Florida Baptist Convention Demands Southern Baptist Convention to Terminate Engagement with Guidepost Solutions
(Disntr) The Florida Baptist State Convention has expressed its strong opposition to the Southern Baptist Convention’s decision to engage Guidepost Solutions, a firm that has been tasked to investigate and evaluate the Executive Committee and establish an abuse reporting hotline. The Florida Baptists’ governing body, the State Board of Missions, unanimously passed a resolution stating that the retention of individuals or organizations that promote views contradictory to the Scriptures is an inappropriate use of Cooperative Program dollars.
The resolution demands that the Southern Baptist Convention terminates all engagements and negotiations with Guidepost Solutions and its subsidiary, Faith Based Solutions, and reassess its decision to use them. Florida Baptists reiterated their commitment to protecting their members from sexual abuse and cooperating with legal obligations in reporting and investigating sexual abuse. The State Board of Missions also established policies and procedures to prevent abuse, report incidents of abuse, and provide survivor care.
The Southern Baptist Convention established a Sexual Abuse Task Force at its 2021 Annual Meeting and engaged Guidepost Solutions to carry…to continue reading, click here.
This article was published at Dissenter
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The entire thing stinks to high Heaven. Millions of dollars of the Lord’s money for a supposedly highly-sophisticated website to maintain a database consisting of a few hundred names. It is nothing short of theft. And it smells like a large amount of money is changing hands under the table.
You could manage that with a tiny little Access database, for crying out loud. Generate a little report the few times a year the list changes. Publish it to the main SBC website, with checksums and so on. Or just distribute it to employers upon request. Job done, and that’s more secure than any public facing interface to the database could ever possibly be. It’s about 10 minutes worth of work, a few times a year.
Even if they must have a website for some reason, and the hangup is about security, there is no reason that they couldn’t bring in security consultants, who specialize in that area, to evaluate the system and to inform and direct the programmers of potential weak spots and how to best address them. That’s all you need.
But at this point, the dummies (and that’s the best case benefit of the doubt) are already contractually obligated to Guideposts.
If scriptural qualifications aren’t going to be honored – and right now they’re not being honored -, then why do you need any list at all? Why bother with background checks, when you don’t even care about the requirements and qualifications that God Himself defined?
While those who most ardently demand the list, are nearly always the same who ignore those most important qualifications. A woman pretends to be a Pastor. Some man commits adultery, or other permanently disqualifying sin, and a few months later he’s back in ministry with the convention’s blessing. On and on.
If you’re not going to honor God’s requirements and God’s specified qualifications, why do you need to conduct any background checks at all?
Maybe, just maybe, if the SBC would start honoring the requirements and qualifications that God defined and put into place, as well as enforcing the consequences for violating them (such as putting 1 Cor. 5 into practice and kicking fornicators out of fellowship), they just might find that the need for lists of abusers and background checks would surprisingly disappear.
It is worth noting that in 1 Cor. 5:1, the word used, again, is porneia. Any and all porneia should warrant disfellowship. Whether male or female, they should be kicked out, and should not be allowed back through the doors, unless it is abundantly clear that they have truly repented and turned from their sin.
Maybe, it just could be, that if the church were to do what the scripture says to do, the need for a list would go away. It just might be that the root of the problem is not doing things God’s way. Maybe it just could be that’s why things are not working as they should. Maybe you’ve got pews full of Bible-denying fornicators selecting fornicators to lead them. And when I say maybe, I mean that as sarcastically as possible. Because we all know that’s exactly what’s happening, and unless they are completely illiterate and unable to read what the scripture plainly says, they should know better.