Written by Stephanie O. Hubach |
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
God doesn’t make water boys. He creates image bearers: human beings blessed with the privilege of reflecting God’s character through whatever God given capacities they possess. This reality is caught more than taught. It is conveyed in how we treat others in our relationships and in how we treat our children throughout the day.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27)
When the younger of my two sons was in elementary school, he had a competitive relationship with one of the neighborhood boys. My son’s way of subtly getting under the other child’s skin was to lean over and whisper, “Water boy,” as he walked past him.  Water boy. Why water boy? In team sports, is the water boy ever on the front page of the news? Is he given the most valuable player award? Does he get lifted to the shoulders of his teammates as they victoriously march off the field? No. The water boy is mostly invisible. He doesn’t wear the uniform. He’s less than a full-fledged team member.
As a parent of a child with disabilities, you are no doubt pain fully aware that whispers of “water boy” can be directed toward your child in countless different ways. The whispers may not be loud, but they are there. In spite of the advances in legal protections on behalf of those with disabilities, the perception that they are “less than” still permeates the atmosphere. These societal whispers can begin to get under our skin.
In God’s economy, however, different is not less than.  In the opening chapter of Scripture, God reminds us of the simple truth that he loves diversity and has imparted value to every human being. He has created humankind to be diverse at the most fundamental level—that of male and female. Even more notable is that God creates every human being in his image. Every one of us is created with great value and an awesome responsibility: to bear God’s character in the world.  There is no higher form of dignity. There is no greater calling.
God doesn’t make water boys. He creates image bearers: human beings blessed with the privilege of reflecting God’s character through whatever God given capacities they possess. This reality is caught more than taught. It is conveyed in how we treat others in our relationships and in how we treat our children throughout the day. When you encounter whispers of “water boy,” remember that although your child may be different, he or she is not less. Your child is endowed with inherent dignity. So, as an image bearer yourself, reflect God’s goodness, truth, and beauty into the world in how you respond to others and to your child.
Taken from Parenting & Disabilities: Abiding in God’s Presence by Stephanie O. Hubach, a recent release from P&R Publishing. Used with permission.

Rather than taking a blank canvas and layering paint drop by drop, he takes a soiled heart, made hard by sin, and softens it, reworks it, in fact, remakes it into his image. His art is not of the kind to hang on a wall for admiration. It’s the kind that stands in the hall, shouting down the corridors the glory of the artist. He’s creating not a showpiece but sons and daughters for himself. And if he’s producing such characters for his own enjoyment and pleasure, to share a part in his joy and gladness, why would he be content with any remaining sin or spot or imperfection? 

The world recognizes Leonardo da Vinci as one of history’s great artists, arguably the greatest ever. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting the world will ever know. He never finally finished the picture. He was still working on it at the time of his death. Leonardo kept it with him, moving it from city to city, never handing it over to the one who commissioned it, because he was never done perfecting it. He tinkered and touched up and remade it throughout his last years of life. He even went to the lengths of painting the undergarments so that the proper texture was visible on the outer garment. He was meticulous and discerning. He researched the muscles of lips on corpses to get the smile just right—a smile that has sparked conversation since its revealing so many years ago. Is she smiling or not? Look at her eyes, and it appears the answer is yes. Look at her mouth, and it becomes debatable. Who could paint such a face full of motion? Only Leonardo because he alone cared enough to research the exact movements of the human mouth. He was never finished until the painting attained a specific and intentional character. So too is God.
In his book, The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says about God something we see in Leonardo’s intention with his art.
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Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.

Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention meets in Anaheim. Delegates (called “messengers”) will face two proposals relating to sex abuse. All evangelicals interested in healthy ministries should take note of what’s going on in the SBC.
As things stand today, the proposals ask for blank checks, secured only by leaders’ promises of a blue sky. But Southern Baptists should not vote for anything they don’t understand, and should not accept legal responsibility for a half-baked “process” that is not yet just and not yet complete.
How We Got to This Point
Last year, messengers to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention authorized an internal investigation of the convention’s Executive Committee (EC). The motion the convention adopted created a task force and directed the president to name sex abuse experts who would hire and oversee an outside, independent expert to investigate “any allegations of abuse, mishandling of abuse, mistreatment of victims, a pattern of intimidation of victims or advocates, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives” by members of the EC staff or board of trustees, going back to 2000. It also authorized them to recommend best practices.
The report and recommendations come to the task force, which would prepare and submit a final report and recommendations before the 2022 annual meeting. The president appointed his task force of Baptists (and some non-Baptists), called the SBC Sex Abuse Task Force (SATF), which contracted with Guidepost Solutions.
Two weeks ago, Guidepost’s report and recommendations were released. The report described a deeply dysfunctional organization. It presented the SBC’s lawyers as paralyzed by litigation risk, refusing to meaningfully engage information brought to them by abuse victims and advocates.
The report also presents the EC trustees as never asking hard questions, preferring for staff to solve any problems quietly and out of public view. The report also included a bombshell sexual assault allegation against a prominent pastor who was a former SBC president, and (until the report) a high official at the SBC’s domestic missionary entity, the North American Missions Board (NAMB).
Except for the bombshell about the NAMB leader, most of the incidents and individuals had been previously disclosed online or in print. Some people welcomed Guidepost’s recommendations, and others praised the narrower, and materially different, recommendations of the SATF issued on June 1.
But there was also widespread criticism of the recommendations as not biblical, not Baptist, and not just. Guidepost proposed that the SBC should maintain an “offender information system,” a public list of those “credibly accused” of sexual abuse and those who “aided and abetted” them. As Matthew Schmitz noted in the Wall Street Journal, this standard “trample[s] the rights of the accused.” In the American Reformer, one of us compared the process to federal Title IX tribunals imposed by the Obama administration on colleges, another “process” that was famously criticized by legal experts for lacking adequate fairness.
Independent Contractor Celebrates Gay Sex
Then, just after the report’s release, Guidepost kicked off a public celebration of LGBT Pride Month, announcing on Twitter that it was an ally of progress and equality, directly opposed to the declaration of the SBC’s “Baptist Faith & Message” that homosexuality and same-sex marriage is sin. Guidepost’s CEO is a graduate of Baylor University, a historically Baptist school, and it had purportedly hired a number of “Baptist subject matter experts,” but Guidepost evidently declined to reverse course.
Clearly, the Task Force has been caught off-guard, first by the Guidepost recommendations, then by its flagrant opposition to the convention’s theology of sex, marriage, and what constitutes an abuse of sexuality. Once touted as experts that understood Baptists, Guidepost is now excused as a mere private investigator.
Also, rather than forward Guidepost’s recommendations, the task force claims they were always tasked with reproducing recommendations to suit the SBC, even though only a few days separate the report’s release and the SBC’s annual meeting. Even the SATF’s recommendations appear tentative; the initial recommendations were published on June 1. A week later, the task force substantially revised them and deleted prior drafts from their blog.
So it is concerning that the task force is resorting to the same dysfunctional habits that Guidepost criticized in the old guard. The task force is letting legal risk aversion limit the experts’ recommendations. And it is trying to get carte blanche authority from messengers to do the sausage-making for them, out of public view.
Messengers should not give their SATF friends a blank check, any more than the EC trustees should have given their lawyer friends a blank check. Even good people with good intentions are poorly served by unaccountable systems.
An Extrajudicial Process for Judging Accusations
Enter Matthew Martens, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for death row inmates and a former clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Martens is a gifted advocate, but, by his own description, not an SBC insider nor a messenger to any prior convention, so perhaps he is not as familiar with the culture of dysfunctional SBC experts asking to be trusted to do the right thing in the back room.
Writing for the SBC’s in-house news service, Martens says SBC messengers should approve the SATF’s Recommendation II, including blanket authority to “create a ministry check website.” This appears to be a much-reduced version of the “offender information system” recommended by Guidepost.
The “MinistryCheck” site proposes to keep a permanent record of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees, and volunteers who have been “credibly accused” (a minimal standard that the accusation is more likely than not true) of sex acts that violate local laws. If a judge or jury has not decided the question, the SATF proposes that outside lawyers could be hired, in some cases by the SBC, to write opinion letters after an investigation.
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