A new online database of Baptist sexual offenders has recently gone live.
Baptistaccountability.org was launched by Dominique and Megan Benninger, former members of Oakwood Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in Pennsylvania formerly led by convicted child molester Donald Foose.
It was the Benningers who uncovered Foose’s prior conviction and incarceration for sexually abusing a minor relative, according to a report published in February by USA Today.
On their website, the couple say they were in part inspired by the work of Christa Brown, an abuse survivor, founder of StopBaptistPredators.org and author of This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and His Gang. Brown also has contributed opinion articles to Baptist News Global.
“As we read Christa Brown’s book, we became more convinced than ever that a new database was needed that could capture the profiles of as many predators and enablers as possible.”
The Benningers also credit the Houston Chronicle’s Abuse of Faith database. In 2019, the Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a six-part series on sex abuse in the SBC.
Baptistaccountability.org is founded upon those two databases, the couple say. They encourage the submission of information about Baptist perpetrators.
“While this database was inspired by SBC abuse, we have opened it to include Baptists of all flavors, not just SBC.”