SBC President Suggest Spending $2M on ‘Sex-Abuse’ Website is Needed to Keep Hackers Out
Days ago, the SBC Executive Committee (EC) revealed that over six million dollars of EC money has been spent on Guidepost Solutions and the Sexual Abuse Task Force. This represents half their net assets, in a scheme interim CFO of the Executive Committee, Mike Bianchi, noted was “unsustainable.”
Furthermore, the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (#ARITF) hired Guidepost Solutions to create a “Ministry Check” website that would serve as a database for “pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees, and volunteers who have at any time been *credibly accused* of sexual abuse and who have been or are associated with a cooperating Southern Baptist church or entity.”
The idea is that if a Southern Baptist church wants to bring on an employee or volunteer, they could run their name through the website to see if they get flagged. According to the Baptist Press, this website is estimated to cost between $1.5-2 million dollars to build and get running.
Of course, there is no way in God’s green earth this sort of website should cost even a tenth of that. When a Twitter user asked Southern Baptist President Bart Barber about the exorbitant sum, he intimated that a website built for less than that would likely get hacked.
Others have pointed out that the very existence of a Ministry Check database run by Guidepost is a highly questionable proposition. Megan Basham explains why:
There is also the fact that the first Guidepost sexual abuse list is a complete joke and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, given it’s populated with repeated, egregious errors and falsities. Given their lack of competancy, what reason do we have to believe they would behave otherwise with this task?
If history is any indication, neither the EC nor the ARITF will offer any more insight, accountability, or transparency into why this website costs so much money, further eroding Southern Baptist’s desire to give any more to such a corrupt and secretive entity.
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Seems to me that every person accused would be innocent until proven guilty according to Biblical standards. If they’re not proven guilty, and have been falsely accused, yet the SBC exposes their names through the website, as if they were guilty, then the SBC is still liable, regardless of how the names made their way into the database, authorized access or not.
The best way to deal with false accusations is God’s way. The false accuser should receive the exact same penalty as the accused would’ve received if guilty. Maybe the SBC should add that to the website.