Report Shines Light On 6 Maryland Southern Baptist Pastors Accused of Sexual Abuse

MARYLAND — Six Southern Baptist pastors in Maryland have emerged as among nearly 700 of the denomination’s clergy who have been “credibly accused” of sexual abuse, the church’s governing body said after a secretly maintained list was released late Thursday.

The document's revelations come after a bombshell report Sunday from an independent investigator that said the top leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention stonewalled and denigrated sexual abuse victims for two decades to protect their own reputations and remained “singularly focused on avoiding liability” for the church.

Maryland pastors on the Southern Baptist Convention’s list of “credibly accused” clergy are:

• Joe Nix Ivey, pastor at Barnesville Baptist Church, Walkersville, Maryland, pleaded guilty to a second-degree sex offense in 2012 and received a 20-year prison sentence with all but four years suspended. He is now a registered sex offender in Frederick County, Maryland.
• Kenneth “Atlantis” Keith Long, committed offenses during a 10-year period at several churches including at Seat Pleasant Baptist Church in Prince George County, Maryland. He was tried in federal court and convicted by a jury on two counts of interstate transportation of a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and two counts of possession of pornography featuring minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Long was sentenced to 360 months in federal prison.
• Timothy Chun-Chuck Mann, ministered at First Baptist Church at Gaithersburg and choir director at Shades Crest Baptist Church. Mann pleaded guilty to child abuse of a 14-year-old female in Maryland in 2008 and was sentenced to 13 years with seven years in confinement, the rest suspended, according to Maryland court records. He is now a registered sex offender in Alabama.
• Joshua M. McCready, youth pastor at First Baptist Church of Berlin, pleaded guilty to nine counts of child abuse in 2000 and served 18 months in jail.
• Douglas Myers, former pastor of several churches including Bayside Baptist Church in Chesapeake Beach pleaded guilty for abusing a 13-year-old boy who was a church member's grandson in 2006. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison for lewd and lascivious conduct with a minor (under 12) in Florida in 2007. After being released, he was convicted in 2012 in Maryland of child abuse for offenses that occurred in 1997, 1999 and 2001. He is currently serving a 15-year sentence in Maryland.
• Walter Harrison Yocum, youth pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Bel Air, MD, pleaded guilty to a single third-degree sex offense in connection with an incident involving a teenage girl. He received a five-year suspended sentence, according to Maryland court records, and is listed as a registered sex offender in Maryland for the 2013 conviction for sexual abuse of a minor.

Patch has reached out to the churches for comment, but they did not immediately respond. We’ll update this story if we hear back.

The release of the names is a public repudiation of the way leaders at the nation’s largest Protestant denomination have responded to allegations of sexual abuse in the past. In doing so, the SBC’s top leaders said they’re committed to listening more attentively to survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

» Read the full list of accused clergy.

"This list is being made public for the first time as an initial, but important, step towards addressing the scourge of sexual abuse and implementing reform in the Convention," the SBC Executive Committee said in a statement on its website. "Each entry in this list reminds us of the devastation and destruction brought about by sexual abuse. Our prayer is that the survivors of these heinous acts find hope and healing, and that churches will utilize this list proactively to protect and care for the most vulnerable among us."

The denomination also released the full report of the investigation conducted by Guidepost Solutions on its handling of sexual abuse allegations. It's available on the website, too.

The denomination’s executive committee said Wednesday in a joint statement with Guidepost Solutions, which conducted the investigation, that it is creating a hotline for sexual abuse survivors that will be “an important stopgap measure” until more meaningful reform can be addressed at the SBC annual meeting in Anaheim, California, next month.

Gene Besen, the interim executive committee counsel, said in a statement after the meeting that the prompt release of the names is in the Southern Baptist Convention’s best interests.

“It’s important, it is of immediate concern to the public and to the survivor committee, and we need to do it right away,” he said.

In an interview with The New York Times, Besen said that moving quickly means that some accused pastors’ names may be redacted because the claims couldn’t be substantiated by news reports and other sources, but researchers may put them back on the list as more facts are known.

“We have become too familiar with using techniques to slow processes down,” Ed Litton, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee said, according to an account in Christianity Today of the decision to release the names of “credibly accused” pastors. “We need to be very mindful that the world is watching, and they don’t need to see business as usual… we have to do this right.”

• Related: Top Southern Baptists Stonewalled Sex Abuse Victims, Report Says

Under the “business as usual” practice, victims of sexual abuse and congregants who supported them repeatedly shared allegations of sexual abuse with top church leaders, “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling and even outright hostility” by some Executive Committee members, according to the nearly 300-page report.

“Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC's response to these reports of abuse … and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC,” the report said, continuing:

“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

Survivors of abuse, both congregants and seminary students, have long pressed the denomination to release the list of clergy “credibly accused” of sexual abuse. The list was maintained for about a decade by an Executive Committee staff member who turned it over to the Executive Committee’s former vice president and general counsel.

The investigator found no indication that anyone “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.