The Miller Spotlight

 If you are a regular reader of Wartburg Watch, you likely saw the  letter  that SBC survivor Jules Woodson sent to her former pastor, who remains at Stonebridge Church more than twenty years after Jules was sexually assaulted by her youth pastor, Andy Savage, in 1998.  To this day, Bradley has not answered this important letter. That's why I decided I would answer it in his place, in a way he might have if he and members at Stonebridge had taken the Convention-wide  Caring Well Challenge :  October 25, 2019 Dear Jules, It's taken far too long for me to find the courage to answer your important letter, which I now see as an amazing gift. Thank you very much. My delay I can only explain by telling you of the change of heart that has come to me in the past few months--partly because of your courage. Yet there's so much more to tell. I want you to know that I am sincerely sorry for what I put you and your family through in the aftermath of Andy assaulting you,...

Logic isn't the driving force that keeps many women in the SBC with their heads in the sand, my husband often reminds me. It's emotion. The need to stay where they are comfortable--that old "at home" feeling. Even now, when the prime leaders for decades have been making excuses for why they cannot stand up to behaviors of their buddies who have clearly committed the most insidious form of malpractice a clergyman can commit by abusing congregants or their own wives and then blaming the women. Ron's right, I know so in my head. Yet my heart wants to believe otherwise. I still want to think that educated women are led first by logic. They follow what they know more than what feels good, I tell myself, even while knowing that I'm in the 25% of women, according to the Meyers-Briggs who have a preference for thinking over feeling. I still want to believe, as I did in childhood, that women stand in solidarity against abuse. Why do I cling to such rationale, ev...