By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (LBM) – The chairman of the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force of the Southern Baptist Convention has announced that the group, which has responsibility for developing and implementing a sexual abuse reporting system, has dropped plans to hire the controversial Guidepost Solutions for the project.
In a statement to The Baptist Paper, a sister publication of The Alabama Baptist newspaper, Marshall Blalock, ARITF chair, said the group had voted “for the sake of building widespread confidence in the Ministry Check website, to seek firms other than Faith Based Solutions and Guidepost Solutions to create and manage the Ministry Check system.”
The SBC has been under fire for having hired the pro-gay Guidepost Solutions, which produced the disputed “Report of the Independent Investigation” about alleged mishandling of sex abuse by the SBC EC. Likewise, the SBC Executive Committee has been criticized for hiring the pro-LGBT Bradley law firm of Nashville to represent it in a related investigation by the Department of Justice.
Southern Baptists were similarly unhappy when the ARITF announced this year that it had hired Guidepost Solutions to develop the “Ministry Check” website.
For instance, the Florida Baptist Convention’s State Board of Missions took the special step of adopting a resolution “acting ad interim for the Florida Baptist State Convention” that “urges the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force and the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to immediately cease further engagement and negotiations with Guidepost Solutions and its subsidiary Faith Based Solutions.”
Blalock told The Baptist Paper there “were many factors going into the decision.” However, he said “primarily” the task force had reversed itself because “breaking up the work into different parts would allow us to search for smaller firms to do the constituent parts.”
“There are advantages to having one firm do it all, but in the estimation of our team, the unity of the Baptists around the country outweighed those advantages,” he wrote. “The work will not be compromised by dividing the responsibilities, which was our major concern. The messengers voted in Anaheim to build the Ministry Check website to help churches identify abusers so that they cannot quietly go from church to church, causing harm to vulnerable people. The ARITF is working under that man[1]date and we understand the sacred urgency of this task.”
In a related development, the North American Mission Board has hired the pro-LGBT D.C. law firm Wilmer Hale to represent it in the Mississippi lawsuit McRaney V. NAMB.
