Parents Should Be Told
At Brookwood Church in South Carolina, leaders knowingly allowed a registered child sex offender to participate in ministry.
As part of the church’s worship team, Jerry Sidell, the sex offender, even played keyboard on the church’s main stage.
Imagine how some of the children and teens likely looked up to him. Parents, too. Few Brookwood congregants knew about Sidell’s prior crimes – crimes that were committed when he was a youth minister in Georgia.
So, Sidell had a specific history of exploiting a church environment for predation.
Authorities said that Sidell had confessed to molesting nine children. He pled guilty to five counts of child molestation and one count of enticing a minor to commit indecent acts.
Despite all that, for more than two decades, Brookwood church leaders platformed Sidell and didn’t disclose his predatory history to church-goers.
Now, having found out about Sidell, former church member David Walsh says it “felt like betrayal.”
Brookwood’s Senior Pastor Blames Satan
When word finally started getting out about Sidell, Brookwood’s senior pastor, Bryan Jones, initially responded to the media attention by stating:
“Satan would love to disrupt what’s happening in this church. He would love to disrupt what God is doing in this church.”
To me, that looks like a cheap deflection and yet another exploitation of faith. Rather than reckoning with church leaders’ own faults, failures, secrecy, and complicity, Jones blames Satan for the negative media attention.
Satan always makes for such an easy out.
Church Member Challenges Leaders’ Lack of Transparency
None of this sat right with David Walsh. He couldn’t accept church leaders’ lack of transparency.
“I feel like parents should be the ones to know,” he said.
And as church leaders held a congregational meeting to try to smooth things over, Walsh still felt “outraged” by what he saw as their continuing lack of transparency. He described church leaders’ efforts to minimize Sidell’s involvement at the church as a “gross mischaracterization.” And even as church leaders claimed Sidell “was never around children,” Walsh said: “I’ve seen him around countless children.”
Walsh and his family are now looking for a new church, and they’re hoping for accountability and transparency. Walsh states:
“I believe that parents should have the knowledge if they’re bringing their children around this man, or anyone else, to at least have the information to make an informed decision for their family.”
It doesn’t seem like this should be too much to ask, does it? For parents to be informed about someone who might be a risk to their children?
Yet, this is exactly where Southern Baptists fail again and again and again… ad infinitum. Churches don’t disclose this information; predatory people can easily church-hop; and national leadership refuses record-keeping and does near-nothing.
Brookwood Illustrates the SBC’s Continuing Problem
Don’t imagine that Brookwood is just some isolated obscure little church. Nope. It’s a prominent megachurch with thousands of members, and it’s affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant faith group in the nation. It’s a church with ample resources that could have readily hired legitimate abuse prevention consultants like GRACE to advise it… but apparently it didn’t.
The SBC keeps claiming that it’s working to educate its churches. But while SBC leaders have been saying that for some 20 years, Brookwood is the real story of what’s actually happening: In churches big and small, Southern Baptists betray the safety of kids and congregants again and again and again. That’s the entrenched pattern.
Whatever educational show SBC leaders are putting on, it appears to be more about PR and institutional image than about effectively educating the churches. But that should come as no surprise, given that, at a recent SBC educational seminar on abuse prevention, they platformed a guy who is documented as having directed the concealment of information related to a missionary’s serial sexual abuses.
With “education” like that, I think you have to wonder whether what they’re offering is more harmful than helpful.
Then there were the webinars put on by Jeff Dalrymple, who holds the lofty title of the SBC’s director of abuse prevention and response. At the very first webinar in the series, the focus was on teaching churches how to help sex offenders and bring them into the church body. Doesn’t that just speak volumes about where their priorities are?
I swear… I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. This is what passes for abuse prevention “education” in the Southern Baptist Convention.
SBC leaders brag about their educational efforts – calling them “godly” and “biblical” – but to me, it feels as though I’m watching Mr. Fox brag about his educational offerings on hen house maintenance.
What Made David Walsh Different?
But here’s what I really wish I could figure out: What is it about David Walsh that made him different from so many others in Southern Baptist churches?
If I could synthesize whatever it is that Walsh has in his blood – whatever it is that made him more skeptical of religious leaders – I’d stand out in front of the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting and offer it up to people.
Why was Walsh able to see the reality of church leaders’ dodges when so many others stay meekly seated in the pews? Why was Walsh able to challenge church leaders’ lack of transparency when, so often, congregants just go along with whatever church leaders say?
Walsh walked away. But why do so many others stay in child-endangering churches like this? Why do people stay in the face of such recklessness and betrayal?
Why isn’t every parent at Brookwood walking out the door… and taking their money with them?
I think part of the answer has to do with the fact that faith is such an integral part of a person’s core identity. So, lots of people will engage all manner of mental contortions to convince themselves that their faith leaders are doing right.
People want so badly to believe in the goodness of their faith leaders, and so they do believe, even in the face of damning evidence.
That’s what I think… but I’d sure be interested to hear what some of you think.
As always… in solidarity.
Originally written by Christa Brown and published in In Solidarity: “Parents Should Be Told.”
