Finally someone is paying attention:

Joy Evans Ryder was 15 years old when she says her church youth director pinned her to his office floor and raped her.

“It’s OK. It’s OK,” he told her. “You don’t have to be afraid of anything.”

He straddled her with his knees, and she looked off into the corner, crying and thinking, “This isn’t how my mom said it was supposed to be.”

The youth director, Dave Hyles, was the son of the charismatic pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, considered at the time the flagship for thousands of loosely affiliated independent fundamental Baptist churches and universities.

youngjoy

Joy Evans Ryder, pictured in this image from a yearbook.

COURTESY JOY EVANS RYDER

At least three other teen girls would accuse Hyles of sexual misconduct, but he never faced charges or even sat for a police interview related to the accusations. When he got in trouble, Hyles was able to simply move on, from one church assignment to the next.

Hyles’ flight to safety has become a well-worn path for ministers in the independent fundamental Baptist movement.

For decades, women and children have faced rampant sexual abuse while worshiping at independent fundamental Baptist churches around the country. The network of churches and schools has often covered up the crimes and helped relocate the offenders, an eight-month Star-Telegram investigation has found.

More than 200 people — current or former church members, across generations — shared their stories of rape, assault, humiliation and fear in churches where male leadership cannot be questioned.

“It’s a philosophy — it’s flawed,” said Stacey Shiflett, an independent fundamental Baptist pastor in Dundalk, Maryland. “The philosophy is you don’t air your dirty laundry in front of everyone. Pastors think if they keep it on the down-low, it won’t impact anyone. And then the other philosophy is it’s wrong to say anything bad about another preacher.”

The Star-Telegram discovered at least 412 allegations of sexual misconduct in 187 independent fundamental Baptist churches and their affiliated institutions, spanning 40 states and Canada.

https://www.star-telegram.com/living/religion/article222576310.html

https://www.star-telegram.com/living/religion/article222576430.html

One thing does bind the churches that face abuse accusations: a culture that uses fear to control and gives men in power the role of unquestioned and ultimate authority. In that environment, abuse has visited scores of fundamental Baptist churches.

And many abusers have escaped consequence-free, often with the help of the pastor in charge.

“A lot of times, it’s phone calls and meetings, because I mean, generally speaking, these type of pressures are not memorialized in writing, OK?” said David Gibbs III, a Florida attorney who represents victims of church abuse. “So we’re not talking like, here’s the text, here’s the email, here’s the letter: ‘Dear abuse victim and your parents, don’t go to the police.’ So there’s a lot of quiet pressure.”

Interviews and documents obtained by the Star-Telegram show three main tactics used by the church to transition abusers to new jobs and hide their actions:

▪ Pastors ship suspected abusers to other churches or church-affiliated schools led by one of their friends from Bible college or the speaking circuit. Both have full knowledge of what happened, according to former members and pastors familiar with the movement.

▪ Pastors recommend a suspected abuser for a new job without informing the church or school about the allegations. In a culture where well-known pastors are elevated to near-godlike status, their recommendations are weighty.

▪ In other cases, pastors pressure victims to keep quiet, telling them they’ll ruin the alleged abuser’s ministry or the pastors simply don’t believe the accusations. They can also bring in a law firm that specializes in the independent fundamental Baptist movement. Victims told the Star-Telegram that lawyers, working on behalf of the church, have tried to intimidate them into silence.

Even if criminal charges are brought against a church leader, he might be allowed to continue in ministry. Facing charges that he had sex with a 14-year-old, a pastor left his Indiana church for Miami, where he told his new congregation that the girl was “promiscuous.” Though he pleaded guilty to felony stalking in 2009, he didn’t leave the church until 2014. He maintains his innocence.

Read more here: https://www.star-telegram.com/living/religion/article222576430.html

W.C. Fields, advocate for a free Baptist press, dies at 96 (Dec 2, 2018)

When he retired, Fields described a 30-year period beginning in 1949 as “the golden age of the Southern Baptist Convention,” marked by rapid growth in all directions and a unity evidenced by widespread support for Bold Mission Thrust, a 25-year strategic plan to share the gospel with every person on earth by the year 2000.

That vision ended in “tragedy,” he recalled, when “dissension, discord, disagreement, disruptions, disputations and divisions” struck the denomination in 1979. “Never in our history has the devil won such a clear and sweeping victory,” Fields described the turmoil and disarray introduced “by an unrelenting, shameless takeover by a narrowly partisan political group thinly disguised now and then by pious phraseology.”

Fields was describing a movement remembered these days in Southern Baptist Convention circles as the “conservative resurgence.” Led by layman Paul Pressler and theologian Paige Patterson, the stated objective was to head off liberalizing influences in the denomination by seizing control of institutions of intellectual authority.

With an unofficial motto “tell the truth and trust the people,” Baptist Press covered activities on both sides of the controversy in detail, often to the displeasure of conservatives gradually winning majorities on trustee boards overseeing Baptist work, including Baptist Press.

Fields’ successor at Baptist Press, Al Shackelford, was elected by a vote of 32-26, after asking for a year to prove to doubters that he would cover the news in a way fair to the conservative side. Three years later Shackelford was fired, along with news editor Dan Martin, sparking censorship concerns that led to formation of Associated Baptist Press, forerunner of Baptist News Global, in 1990.

Under the title “SBC Journalism: Besieged!” Fields described a “brazen, shameless attempt by fundamentalists to intimidate, bully and undermine Southern Baptist journalists and their publications.”

Quoted by Molly Worthen in Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelism, Fields argued that the campaign to co-opt church media was not merely a political tactic but posed a threat to the core of Baptist identity.

https://baptistnews.com/article/w-c-fields-advocate-for-a-free-baptist-press-dead-at-96/#.XBAfcC3Mzb8