Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories related to an independent report related to cases of sexual abuse within churches with ties to the Southern Baptist Convention.
The city of Augusta was the birthplace of the Southern Baptist Convention and is now watching as a sexual abuse scandal threatens to blow the organization apart. Two Augustans have been front and center in the unfolding matter, one as a church leader and another as an accused abuser.
The Southern Baptist Convention has acknowledged that many of its past senior staff were aware of child sexual abuse claims against clergy, staff and volunteers throughout member churches. The Convention has also acknowledged that a 205-page “highly confidential” list of known offenders has existed for two decades and was maintained by a senior staff member.
MORE: A new approach to an ugly problem
A 288-page independent investigative report created by Guidepost Solutions, LLC, completed at the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention, reveals that the organization’s past leaders, including former Executive Committee President Frank Page, formerly of Augusta, were aware of numerous cases of child sexual abuse and rather than investigate the claims, they acted to protect the organization, thereby protecting the alleged abusers.
While the members of the executive committee have plausible deniability because the list of suspected child predators working at member churches was compiled by a staffer and not made privy to them, the evidence in the Guidepost report shows that the list was maintained for years and that despite their protestations of being unaware of a “highly confidential list,”members of the executive committee were very much aware of sexual abuse allegations within member churches but chose to ignore what were deemed credible allegations. According to the report, Convention trustees were told the amount and terms of legal settlements but given few other details.
In May 2019, the staffer, Dr. Roger Oldham, acknowledged he’d maintained for more than a decade a database of ministers arrested for sexual abuse. The most recent list, according to the Guidepost report, contained at least 409 names of abusers who were thought to have been affiliated with a Southern Baptist church at some point in the past.
Page, who served as executive committee president from 2010 to 2018 and was the senior pastor of Warren Baptist Church in Augusta from 1991 to 2001, still maintains he knew nothing about sexual abuse allegations against employees of Southern Baptist Convention member churches.
“I don’t have time to talk about this. I don’t know anything about any of what you’re talking about,” Page said when reached by phone at his home in South Carolina.
MORE: Armed drug trafficker sentenced to federal prison
However, the Guidepost report clearly shows that Page did know about at least one of the allegations, corresponded with that alleged victim and engaged in what the report describes as an effort to “minimize or ignore allegations in an effort to protect the reputation of the SBC and avoid the risk of legal liability for sexual abuse at SBC churches.”
Page responded by letter to one victim who had asked that the Southern Baptist Convention intervene when it was made aware of abuse, stating “[m]any of the things you have asked for me to do are far beyond my authority and ability.”
Under Southern Baptist polity, churches within the convention are autonomous and independent. Unlike other church denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t have an authority over these independent congregations, as outlined in its constitution. The purpose of the convention is to engage churches in missions’ activities.
This is another reason for the lack of accountability by the member churches.
According to the report, executive committee members actually tried to discredit people coming forward, labeling them “opportunistic” and “professional victims with an agenda of lawsuits.”
Southern Baptist Convention General Counsel Augie Boto went as far as to characterize the alleged victims as being unwitting operatives of Satan.
“They have gone to the SBC looking for sexual abuse, and of course, they found it. Their outcries have certainly caused an availability cascade (just like Lois Gibbs did in the Love Canal example). But they are not to blame. This is the devil being temporarily successful,” Boto wrote in an internal email.
Lois Gibbs, who is referenced in Boto’s email, is the woman who exposed the illegal dumping of chemicals in the defunct Love Canal, located in upstate New York, which led to the evacuation of over 800 families in the early 1980s.
MORE: Prison term imposed in Columbia County child molestation case
According to the Guidepost report, Boto also appeared in court as a character witness for Mark Schiefelbein, a gymnastics coach convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault against a minor. In 2003, a jury found Schiefelbein guilty of seven counts of aggravated sexual battery and one count of aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor. He was sentenced to 96 years in prison, but that term was later reduced to 36 years.
Meanwhile, Page was forced to step down as the executive committee president after admitting to moral failings of his own. According to the Guidestar report, Page admitted to having an extramarital affair with an adult church worker.
The “highly confidential” list, which was reportedly unknown to executive committee members, but was released by the Southern Baptist Convention includes the name of an infamous Augustan, Robert Dorsett, proving that the list goes back decades.
Dorsett was a youth minister and training director at First Baptist Church in Augusta during the 1970s and 1980s. During this time, Dorsett molested countless numbers of boys and was able to get away with his crimes because the church leadership allowed it, according to many victims and their families.
In 1999, Dorsett admitted in court to grooming the boys by encouraging them to have “shaving cream fights” while naked in the showers and later plied them with alcohol and gave them pornography to view before serially sexually assaulting them.
According to court testimony and witness accounts, Dorsett was allowed by the leadership at the time of First Baptist Church to quietly resign his position and he moved to Aiken where he abused more boys.
Finally, in 1998, the Augusta man on the Southern Baptist Convention’s secret list of known sexual predators was caught. Dorsett pled guilty to 15 counts of aggravated sexual assault against a minor. He admitted to abusing seven children. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison and died in Greenville, S.C. in 2020 after receiving parole.
First Baptist Church of Augusta has not been a member of the Southern Baptist Convention since 1991 when it became a founding member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, according to the Rev. Will Dyer, the church’s senior pastor. but Dorsett’s name remained on the list compiled by convention staffers even after the convicted pedophile had died.
MORE: Teen dies in four-wheeler accident
The recent admissions by the Southern Baptist Convention offer little consolation to Dorsett’s victims and their families.
Lora Yarborough Baxley, who is the sister of the late Dr. Mark Yarborough, a victim of Dorsett, says that it feels like ripping off the scab of a still fresh wound.
“When Mark finally told us what had happened to him as a child, he was an adult when he told us; but when he finally did, we all tried to expose that man as the criminal that he was. He was a con man and he was a predator. We called law enforcement, my dad went down to the church and talked to them, but no one would listen to us,” Baxley said.
While Dorsett’s criminal abuse took place mostly before Dyer was born, he says that First Baptist Church of Augusta has long learned from the lessons of the past and that anyone working with children, whether employed or as a volunteer must go through a background check to maintain a safe and even sacred environment for the children.
Dyer also says that it is time for the public to be made aware of what has transpired in the past.
“I grieve for the victims, children, women, anyone who has been abused in the name of Jesus. It’s a terrible thing, and I’m pretty sure that the God we worship as lord and savior said that there is nothing that is done in the dark that will not come to light,” Dyer said.
Scott Hudson is the senior reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
