Welcome to the Daily Article Podcast from Monday, May the 23rd, 2022.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Jim Denison.

This is how Russell Moore, who leads the public theology project at Christianity Today

and is a former Southern Baptist Convention agency leader,

is responding to a report now making global headlines.

The nearly 300-page investigation was released yesterday afternoon.

Christianity Today summarizes its findings.

Armed with a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors,

Southern Baptist leaders chose to protect the denomination first

from lawsuits rather than protect the people in their churches from further abuse.

The report was a $2 million undertaking that involved 330 interviews and 5 terabytes of documents

collected over eight months.

It's the largest investigation in the Southern Baptist Convention's 177-year history.

The report states, when abuse allegations were brought to the executive committee,

including allegations that convicted sex offenders were still in ministry,

executive committee leaders generally did not discuss

this information outside of their inner circle, often did not respond to the survivor, and took

no action to address these allegations so as to prevent ongoing abuse or such abuse in the future.

Instead, almost always the internal focus was on protecting the

Southern Baptist Convention from legal liability and not on caring for survivors or creating

any plan to prevent sexual abuse within Southern Baptist churches. Denison Ministries is non-denominational

and thus not related to the Southern Baptist Convention.

...