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Southern Baptist leader’s remarks on church sex-abuse cases fall far short, says survivor

The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention should have spoken out more forcefully on widespread charges of abuse and sexual misconduct by church figures in the organization on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” says an abuse survivor.

The Rev. Bart Barber, a Texas pastor elected in June to clean up the sex scandals that have roiled the 13.7 million-member denomination, acknowledged on the CBS program that SBC leaders had mistreated abuse victims.

But his condemnation of misconduct by clergy and others in the SBC fell short, according to Christa Brown, a former Southern Baptist who said she’d been raped as a teen by her then-pastor.