Researcher on What Churches Get Wrong With Sexual Abuse

During this week’s Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, pastors overwhelmingly passed a resolution declaring their opposition to sexual abuse in any form, and the responsibility of pastors to involve authorities in criminal matters. It was an important, if largely symbolic, moment following the recent scandal and subsequent firing of Paige Patterson.

The problem, however, is that most pastors would have in theory already agreed with these points. In reality, when church leadership is faced with a sexual abuse crisis in its own midst, the responses often range from well-intentioned but misguided to spiritually abusive. There is a gap, in other words, between what most churches would say they affirm, and the reality of how they respond. To understand why this happens, I turned to Wade Mullen, the director of the M.Div. program at Capital Seminary & Graduate School. Mullen studied how churches respond to crises in their midst—usually sexual abuse—and wrote his dissertation on the myriad ways churches respond poorly to crisis.

The following is a portion of a phone interview I did with Mullen last week. Read More

Also See:
10 Ways to Spot Spiritual Abuse