Yes to CRM; No to similarly effective protection of 'giving units' from predators

The Baptist General Convention of Texas is spending $2.14 million on database-driven Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for the purpose of maintaining donor relationships with current giving units (essentially, Texas Baptists), and no doubt to develop relationships with new giving units.

This is the same BGCT which under different top leadership spent some $1.3 million on the Valleygate church planting which produced some still-undetermined, small percent of the new churches originally reported. Investment in management software does appear to make some sense for them. Although they had to tap an emergency reserve fund to finish paying for the system.

Christa Brown thoughtfully observes that while building their CRM system, they're creating a database for tracking the "giving records" of Texas Baptists who make donations (essentially, "giving units"). While the Southern Baptist Convention will not create a database to track Baptist clergy who are sexual predators. Despite the very large number of currently active Southern Baptist clerical predators. From whom the "giving units" should be protected.

The BGCT has a limited-effect anti-predator file called Broken Trust. Not at all like the CRM system.

Churches may report if they elect to, but according to the ethics expert who helped BGCT set up the system, “churches don’t have to report abuse cases to the registry and aren’t likely to.” The result is not a functional predator-tracking database. As of this writing, it's an online list of 10 names and the claim that "In addition to the names listed above, in keeping with the mission of the BGCT and as a public service, the Convention endeavors to maintain records relating to confirmed* cases of sexual abuse or sexual improprieties by members of the clergy in BGCT-affiliated churches."

So for the SBC and to a slightly lesser degree the BGCT, it's still pass the offering plate please. And hush. We must keep our priorities straight.

Trample freedom of expression, but nothing to stop pedophiles?

How ironic for Richard Land to mourn the death of the unconstitutional, technologically ineffective Child Online Protection Act without having raised his voice for a pedophilia database to help protect young Baptists from clerical sexual predators.

Land is head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. He decried the high court's decision on Jan. 22 as follows:

Unfortunately, our Supreme Court has concluded that an adult's supposed 'right' to see anything he wants to see trumps society's obligation to protect children from exposure to such spiritual toxic waste. Untold human suffering will be the result of this stupefyingly wrong decision.

As if parents were unable to take measures to protect their children.

It would be irrationally optimistic to expect Land and other COPA supporters to note that it:

• Would have imposed serious burdens on constitutionally-protected speech -- anything conceivably "harmful to minors." That standard proved impossible to effectively define.
• Would have failed to prevent children from seeing inappropriate material originating from outside of the US, or available by means other than the World Wide Web.
• Did not represent the least restrictive means of regulating speech. Parental supervision assisted by individually applied filters appear to be that.

A study commissioned by 49 state attorneys general, and released on January 14, noted that parents set their household standards and are the true enforcers of them. As a result:

Parents and caregivers should: educate themselves about the Internet and the ways in which their children use it, as well as about technology in general; explore and evaluate the effectiveness of available technological tools for their particular child and their family context, and adopt those tools as may be appropriate; be engaged and involved in their children's Internet use; be conscious of the common risks youth face to help their children understand and navigate the technologies; be attentive to at-risk minors in their community and in their children's peer group; and recognize when they need to seek help from others.

May we turn now to dealing with the large number of Baptist clerical sexual predators?

Last year the SBC failed to implement an obvious solution that would help, thus earning itself sixth place on Time Magazine's Top 10 Underreported News Stories of 2008:

Facing calls to curb child sex abuse within its churches, in June the Southern Baptist Convention -- the largest U.S. religious body after the Catholic Church -- urged local hiring committees to conduct federal background checks but rejected a proposal to create a central database of staff and clergy who have been either convicted of or indicted on charges of molesting minors.

Certainly the SBC cares enough about children to implement a solution that would actually help remedy a devastatingly destructive problem which burns like a wildfire through its midst?