My remarks about the ticking time bomb have to do with someone who is about to become a first-time offender. A registry can do nothing to stop them. Good discipleship and church discipline, which has restoration as its ultimate aim, can prevent these things.

I have heard of a case in a christian high school where a pregnant girl was expelled, and the expulsion was carried out with an attitude of, “How dare you defile our bastion of purity?” That is a reprehensible way to carry out a necessary action, and it’s the idea most folks get when they think of church discipline. I recommend you read Dr. Wills’ Democratic Religion for a different view of church discipline.

Your text, while reminding us all of what we once were before we were cleansed, makes an important point in my favor, and that is that if someone is committing sexual immorality or practicing homosexuality, he has not been cleansed, is not an heir to the Kingdom of heaven, and is not a believer. Anyone who practices such things and claims to be a Christian is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The two men named in the WHAS report are under “supervised release”. They are still serving the sentence for their convictions. That to me is a pretty clear sign that this is not something in the distant past for these men, and they have bigger fish to fry than to be preparing for the ministry. I pray with you that I will finish the race well.

Jeff,

Have realized that you copied and pasted your comment from SBF’s post, I will not reply here as well. You can find my comments and response on the SBF post.

A national Southern Baptist sex offender’s registry would not guarantee that sexual abuse would stop for two reasons, 1. You can’t force individual churches to make use of it on the hiring end. 2. Databases do nothing to catch the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the ticking time bomb who has not yet acted on his impulses for the first time.

A sex offender registry would be a good idea, at least for good public relations to be able to be seen to be “doing something” but it won’t address the core of the problem, and that is unregenerate church members. We are so hesitant to question someone’s salvation that even when he has committed an egregious and notorious sin such as sexual abuse of children that demands he be excommunicated until he repents and shows works consistent with repentance, a local Baptist church is far more likely to quietly send the man on his merry way than to publicly confront and discipline the man.

Recapturing regnerate church membership and church discipline are the keys to overcoming this egregious problem, not a database, although I do think we should have a database as a bare-minimum measure.