Southern Baptists plan to hire Guidepost Solutions to run abuser tracking database

Published

2 years ago

February 22, 2023

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(RNS) — For years, Southern Baptist leaders told members of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination that setting up a database to track abusive pastors was impossible.

Now that impossible task is one step closer to being a reality.

Charleston pastor Marshall Blalock, chair of a Southern Baptist task force charged with implementing abuse reforms, announced Monday (Feb. 20) that the task force had recommended hiring Guidepost Solutions, an international consulting firm, to set up the database. The Southern Baptist Convention’s credentials committee, which works in partnership with the task force, concurred with the recommendation.

The announcement was made during a regular meeting of the SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee. Once a contract with Guidepost is finalized, the president of the Executive Committee will be tasked with signing it.

Known as the Ministry Check website, the database will include the names of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees and volunteers who have been credibly accused of abuse.

According to the task force, being credibly accused means those who confessed, those who have been convicted of abuse or those who have had a civil judgment against them for abuse. It would also include those who have been investigated by a “qualified, independent, third-party investigative firm.”

Blalock said the committee looked at 18 different firms before choosing Guidepost, which previously worked on a major abuse investigation for the SBC. The report from that investigation led the SBC’s 2022 annual meeting to approve a series of reforms — including the Ministry Check website.

Before announcing the selection of Guidepost, Blalock made an impassioned plea about the necessity of abuse reform, saying action and not words were needed. He also condemned those who covered up abuse in order to avoid public controversy.

“Handling things quietly has often been the practice, but it only perpetuates the abuse, leaving victim after victim silently suffering,” he said. “Churches are often well-intentioned. Even some of the worst mistakes our churches have made have been well-meaning actions that did more harm than good.” RELATED: Southern Baptists passed abuse reforms last year. Now they have to make them stick.

Making reforms like the Ministry Check database a reality will be costly and complicated, said Blalock. But it is necessary.

“We can’t let threats of lawsuits stop needed reforms,” he said. “We can’t let the potential costs stop needed reforms. We can’t let uninformed opinions, even well-meaning but uninformed opinions, stop reforms. We can’t let speculation and misinformation stop reform.”

Hiring Guidepost to run the Ministry Check website could reignite a smoldering conflict over the denomination’s future. In recent years, leaders of a group known as the Conservative Baptist Network, along with some of their allies, have claimed the SBC has become too liberal and strayed from its biblical roots.

Among those allies is Florida pastor and failed SBC presidential candidate Tom Ascol, who has been critical of Guidepost in the past because the consulting firm supports LGBTQ rights. Last year, several state Baptist conventions cut ties with the consulting firm after a Guidepost staffer posted a pro-LGBTQ message during Pride Month. Ascol also believes local churches, not the denomination, should deal with issues of abuse.

Ascol called Blalock’s announcement “madness” on social media and asked pastors to call the Executive Committee to protest.

“Otherwise,” he said on Twitter, “prepare to explain to the members of your church that their offerings will be going to a ‘proud ally’ of those committed to the sexual perversion of our society.

Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor and former CBN-backed candidate who narrowly lost the 2021 SBC presidential election, also was critical of the announcement. The chair of the task force seems to think the problem is that Guidepost tweeted their ungodly corporate values, therefore the solution is, theyve stopped tweeting about their support for a radical LGBTQ agenda.

No sir, Mr. Chairman. Youve missed it by a country mile. pic.twitter.com/8JtXgYliO7

— Mike Stone (@PastorMikeStone) February 21, 2023

Blalock said Guidepost’s pro-LGBTQ tweet from 2022 was “disappointing.” But he said Guidepost was still the best-qualified firm to run the Ministry Check website. He also said the database will be overseen by a new division of Guidepost that works specifically with faith-based groups.

He said the head of the faith-based division, senior managing director Samantha Kilpatrick, has a master’s degree from an SBC seminary and is a member of an SBC church.

“She is godly, capable and trustworthy,” he said. “I could not be more grateful that she is willing and available to come alongside us in this process.”

Kilpatrick was named head of the Guidepost faith-based division in November.

“With Samantha’s extensive legal background and involvement in her own community faith-based organizations, she is well-positioned to lead our Faith-Based Organizations practice,” Julie Myers Wood, CEO of Guidepost Solutions, said in a statement at the time. “Guidepost Solutions is committed to working with faith-based communities and frameworks to conduct independent investigations and enhance compliance.”

After Blalock’s report, the Executive Committee heard from SBC President Bart Barber as well as Executive Committee interim President Willie McLaurin. A search committee looking for a new Executive Committee president had hoped to bring a recommendation to the meeting but announced it was not able to do that.

The meeting concluded with prayers for the victims of recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria as well as for former United States President Jimmy Carter. A longtime Baptist Sunday school teacher, Carter went into hospice care recently.

“We want to pray for President Carter and his family as he has been placed on hospice and as he is taking his last breath,” said Executive Committee Chairman Jared Wellman in his closing prayer. “Lord, we pray for him not to be in any pain. We pray for his family as they stand beside him.” RELATED: Todd Benkert leaves SBC abuse task force after conflict over pastor’s restoration Share Tweet Share

Technology

Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

Published

2 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Google hit with second antitrust blow, adding to concerns about future of ads business

Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Alex Wong | Getty Images

Google’s antitrust woes are continuing to mount, just as the company tries to brace for a future dominated by artificial intelligence.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets due to its position between ad buyers and sellers.

The ruling, which followed a September trial in Alexandria, Virginia, represents a second major antitrust blow for Google in under a year. In August, a judge determined the company has held a monopoly in its core market of internet search, the most-significant antitrust ruling in the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

Google is in a particularly precarious spot as it tries to simultaneously defend its primary business in court while fending off an onslaught of new competition due to the emergence of generative AI, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which offers users alternative ways to search for information. Revenue growth has cooled in recent years, and Google also now faces the added potential of a slowdown in ad spending due to economic concerns from President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs.

Parent company Alphabet reports first-quarter results next week. Alphabet’s stock price dipped more than 1% on Thursday and is now down 20% this year.

Why Google's antitrust woes endangers its AI momentum

In Thursday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said Google’s anticompetitive practices “substantially harmed” publishers and users on the web. The trial featured 39 live witnesses, depositions from an additional 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

Judge Brinkema ruled that Google unlawfully controls two of the three parts of the advertising technology market: the publisher ad server market and ad exchange market. Brinkema dismissed the third part of the case, determining that tools used for general display advertising can’t clearly be defined as Google’s own market. In particular, the judge cited the purchases of DoubleClick and Admeld and said the government failed to show those “acquisitions were anticompetitive.”

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president or regulatory affairs, said in an emailed statement. “We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a press release from the DOJ that the ruling represents a “landmark victory in the ongoing fight to stop Google from monopolizing the digital public square.”

Potential ad disruption

If regulators force the company to divest parts of the ad-tech business, as the Justice Department has requested, it could open up opportunities for smaller players and other competitors to fill the void and snap up valuable market share. Amazon has been growing its ad business in recent years.

Meanwhile, Google is still defending itself against claims that its search has acted as a monopoly by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance. Google said in August, immediately after the search case ruling, that it would appeal, meaning the matter can play out in court for years even after the remedies are determined.

The remedies trial, which will lay out the consequences, begins next week. The Justice Department is aiming for a break up of Google’s Chrome browser and eliminating exclusive agreements, like its deal with Apple for search on iPhones. The judge is expected to make the ruling by August.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai (L) and Apple CEO Tim Cook (R) listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a roundtable with American and Indian business leaders in the East Room of the White House on June 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images

After the ad market ruling on Thursday, Gartner’s Andrew Frank said Google’s “conflicts of interest” are apparent by how the market runs.

“The structure has been decades in the making,” Frank said, adding that “untangling that would be a significant challenge, particularly since lawyers don’t tend to be system architects.”

However, the uncertainty that comes with a potentially years-long appeals process means many publishers and advertisers will be waiting to see how things shake out before making any big decisions given how much they rely on Google’s technology.

“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Frank said. “Those kind of incentives may create opportunities for other publishers or ad tech players.”

A date for the remedies trial hasn’t been set.

Damian Rollison, senior director of market insights for marketing platform Soci, said the revenue hit from the ad market case could be more dramatic than the impact from the search case.

“The company stands to lose a lot more in material terms if its ad business, long its main source of revenue, is broken up,” Rollison said in an email. “Whereas divisions like Chrome are more strategically important.”

WATCH: U.S. judge finds Google holds illegal online ad-tech monopolies

Politics

Trump blasts ‘too late’ Powell for not cutting interest rates

Published

2 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Trump blasts ‘too late’ Powell for not cutting interest rates

US President Donald Trump renewed his criticism of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, accusing him of being too slow to cut interest rates and escalating a long-running conflict that risks undermining the central bank’s political independence.

With the European Central Bank (ECB) cutting interest rates again on April 17, “Too Late” Powell has failed to act appropriately in the United States, even with inflation falling, Trump said on Truth Social on April 17.

“Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Trump said.

Florida Senator Rick Scott agreed with the president, saying, “it’s time for new leadership at the Federal Reserve.”

Trump’s public criticism of the Fed breaks a decades-long convention in American politics that sought to safeguard the central bank from political scrutiny, which includes any executive decision to replace the chair.

In an April 16 address at the Economic Club of Chicago, Powell said Fed independence is “a matter of law.” Powell previously signaled his intent to serve out the remainder of his tenure, which expires in May 2026.

Crypto, risk assets look to the Fed for guidance

The Federal Reserve wields significant influence over financial markets, with its monetary policy decisions affecting US dollar liquidity and shaping investor sentiment.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, crypto markets have increasingly come under the Fed’s sphere of influence due to the rising correlation between dollar liquidity and asset prices.

This was further corroborated by a 2024 academic paper written by Kingston University of London professors Jinsha Zhao and J Miao, which concluded that liquidity conditions now account for more than 65% of Bitcoin’s (BTC) price movements.

As inflation moderates and market turmoil intensifies amid the trade war, Fed officials are facing mounting pressure to cut interest rates. However, Powell has reiterated the central bank’s wait-and-see approach as officials evaluate the potential impact of tariffs.

The Fed is expected to maintain its wait-and-see policy approach at its next meeting in May, with Fed Fund futures prices implying a less than 10% chance of a rate cut. However, rate cut bets have increased to more than 65% for the Fed’s June policy meeting.

Technology

Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

Published

2 hours ago

April 17, 2025

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Discord sued by New Jersey over child safety features

Jason Citron, CEO of Discord in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

The New Jersey attorney general sued Discord on Thursday, alleging that the company misled consumers about child safety features on the gaming-centric social messaging app.

The lawsuit, filed in the New Jersey Superior Court by Attorney General Matthew Platkin and the state’s division of consumer affairs, alleges that Discord violated the state’s consumer fraud laws.

Discord did so, the complaint said, by allegedly “misleading children and parents from New Jersey” about safety features, “obscuring” the risks children face on the platform and failing to enforce its minimum age requirement.

“Discord’s strategy of employing difficult to navigate and ambiguous safety settings to lull parents and children into a false sense of safety, when Discord knew well that children on the Application were being targeted and exploited, are unconscionable and/or abusive commercial acts or practices,” lawyers wrote in the legal filing.

They alleged that Discord’s acts and practices were “offensive to public policy.”

A Discord spokesperson said in a statement that the company disputes the allegations and that it is “proud of our continuous efforts and investments in features and tools that help make Discord safer.”

“Given our engagement with the Attorney General’s office, we are surprised by the announcement that New Jersey has filed an action against Discord today,” the spokesperson said.

One of the lawsuit’s allegations centers around Discord’s age-verification process, which the plaintiffs believe is flawed, writing that children under thirteen can easily lie about their age to bypass the app’s minimum age requirement.

The lawsuit also alleges that Discord misled parents to believe that its so-called Safe Direct Messaging feature “was designed to automatically scan and delete all private messages containing explicit media content.” The lawyers claim that Discord misrepresented the efficacy of that safety tool.

“By default, direct messages between ‘friends’ were not scanned at all,” the complaint stated. “But even when Safe Direct Messaging filters were enabled, children were still exposed to child sexual abuse material, videos depicting violence or terror, and other harmful content.”

The New Jersey attorney general is seeking unspecified civil penalties against Discord, according to the complaint.

The filing marks the latest lawsuit brought by various state attorneys general around the country against social media companies.

In 2023, a bipartisan coalition of over 40 state attorneys general sued Meta over allegations that the company knowingly implemented addictive features across apps like Facebook and Instagram that harm the mental well being of children and young adults.

The New Mexico attorney general sued Snap in Sep. 2024 over allegations that Snapchat’s design features have made it easy for predators to easily target children through sextortion schemes.

The following month, a bipartisan group of over a dozen state attorneys general filed lawsuits against TikTok over allegations that the app misleads consumers that its safe for children. In one particular lawsuit filed by the District of Columbia’s attorney general, lawyers allege that the ByteDance-owned app maintains a virtual currency that “substantially harms children” and a livestreaming feature that “exploits them financially.”

In January 2024, executives from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Discord and X were grilled by lawmakers during a senate hearing over allegations that the companies failed to protect children on their respective social media platforms.

WATCH: The FTC has an uphill battle in its antitrust case against Meta.