What a DOJ abuse case revealed about SBC seminary's accountability for mishandling reports

This story has been updated to correct information about charges in the case.

A top Southern Baptist seminary's internal accountability measures for abuse reporting has faced little public scrutiny — despite a conviction last week in a federal probe into Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated agencies.

Most public attention has been on how Matt Queen, a North Carolina pastor and former interim provost at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, lied to federal investigator s. Last week, Queen pleaded guilty to a felony in the only prosecution to emerge so far from the U.S. Department of Justice investigation, a probe that began with a much wider scope into abuse coverup throughout the Nashville-based SBC.

The case largely focused on Queen’s interactions with the FBI and not on the underlying actions by Southwestern leadership in response to several administrators dismissing or downplaying a Nov. 3, 2022, abuse report about former Southwestern student Christian Flores.

But an analysis of court records and other publicly available information highlights how Southwestern delayed disciplining those administrators, even though seminary leaders grew aware of wrongdoing months prior.

It’s unclear if the federal inquiry is ongoing or if prosecutors intend to charge any other former Southwestern staff over the same incident that led to Queen’s prosecution.

“It has been our commitment to cooperate fully (with federal investigation), and we have communicated repeatedly this expectation to all members of seminary leadership,” Southwestern said in a Thursday statement in response to a request for comment. “When we have become aware of instances in which the institutional response has fallen short of this standard, we have worked swiftly to remedy these issues.”

Scandals at Southwestern have often been a bellwether for troubling patterns throughout the nation's largest Protestant denomination, especially with sex abuse and financial mismanagement . Southwestern is one of six SBC-affiliated seminaries and historically one of the largest and most influential of those six.

Due to the breakdowns in Southwestern administrators’ response to the Flores abuse report and other instances in which the seminary faced criticism for similar issues, the seminary has changed some of its procedures, the seminary said in its statement.

“We have reconstituted and strengthened the Behavioral Intervention Team, a group of key institutional leaders who are immediately informed of sexual abuse reports, are collectively responsible to ensure that all necessary reports are made and provide care to victims,” Southwestern said.

More: Southern Baptist pastor pleads guilty to felony in federal inquiry into seminary for abuse

The police chief and parallel criticism over the same problem

Southwestern dean Terri Stovall was the first among the seminary’s staff to learn about abuse allegations against Flores in a Nov. 3, 2022, conversation with a counselor at a local church.

A nearby municipal police department was handling Flores’ case, but Stovall still notified Southwestern campus chief of police Kevin Collins soon after. But Collins did not notify other seminary leadership of the allegations against Flores, according to court documents and seminiary statements.

Collins “took no further action in November,” the seminary said in a May 29 news release. Instead, seminary leadership learned Flores’ alleged abuse months later when the nearby municipal police department executed an arrest warrant for Flores, leading the seminary to expel Flores and publicly address the arrest in a news release.

That delayed awareness among seminary leadership based on Collins' actions is one example of a much larger pattern of ineffective communication about reported abuse. Notably, the seminary was facing criticism for that pattern at around the same time in a separate civil case.

That civil case, against the seminary and former Southwestern president Paige Patterson , centers around Patterson reportedly intimidating a former female student who reported being raped. The former female student, identified in court as Jane Roe, sought information about other reports of sexual assault on campus in addition to hers. By late 2022, Roe's attorneys were fighting the seminary over its scant and slow compliance with requests to produce records about those other abuse cases.

“Throughout this litigation, SWBTS (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) and its counsel have engaged in a concerted effort to conceal evidence and misrepresent facts,” Jane Roe said in an Oct. 4, 2022 court filing. “SWBTS withheld relevant and discoverable evidence, essentially ignoring requests for production of documents.”

The court battle over these records pointed to a broader issue with the institution’s culture for responding to abuse cases, often with a lack of urgency.

U.S. District Court Judge Sean Jordan, who was overseeing the case, later challenged Jane Roe’s assertion the seminary officials were acting in bad faith. But the judge also acknowledged a pattern of incompetence at the seminary over many years and under different administrative management with maintaining and elevating reports of abuse.

Some of that analysis of incompetence focused specifically on campus police under the leadership of Collins as chief and that of his predecessor. In Jane Roe's case, much of that criticism about the police department centered on a totally different incident in which a former female student, identified as "S.B" in court filings, alleging an adjunct professor of sexual abuse.

Collins could not be reached for comment.

Delayed discipline

Following Collins’ muted response to Stovall’s initial abuse report against Flores, Stovall informed Queen, who was Southwestern’s interim provost at the time, and former Southwestern chief of staff Heath Woolman of the Nov. 3, 2022 abuse report about Flores.

Woolman reportedly instructed Stovall to destroy evidence related to that initial report, a moment that would later become central to federal prosecutors’ case against Queen, according to court documents and seminary statements.

Notably, seminary leadership that same week reminded staff in a meeting — attended by Collins, Woolman and Queen — “of their obligation to retain and produce relevant documents,” Southwestern said in its Thursday statement about that January 2023 meeting.

In the narrative of the institution’s response, a turning point was a Feb. 13, 2023 meeting between Stovall, Queen, Woolman, Collins, top seminary leadership and its attorney, according to court filings. In that meeting, Stovall shared how Collins, Queen and Woolman dismissed or downplayed her notifications about the Flores abuse report.

Seminary leaders came out of that February meeting not fully convinced of wrongdoing by Collins, Queen and Woolman, but at least doubtful those three administrators behaved with integrity in response to learning about the Flores abuse report, according to court documents and the seminiary's statements. Federal prosecutors have never identified Stoval and Woolman by name in court records, but Southwestern confirmed their identities in a May news release following a story by The Tennessean .

“From February to June 2023, the seminary operated within the tension that employees in whom we had confidence had different recollections regarding the January conversation at the center of the Matt Queen case,” Southwestern said in its Thursday statement.

The seminary attributes that tension to its reason for not pursuing disciplinary action against those administrators until months later.

Woolman was the exception, and he didn’t face any discipline before resigning that May amid his candidacy to pastor Fruit Cove Baptist Church in St. Johns, Florida, where he remains the pastor. Southwestern president David Dockery wrote a brief endorsement for Woolman, which Dockery clarified was more of a congratulatory note rather than a recommendation provided during the pastoral search process, Southwestern said in its Thursday statement.

Southwestern suspended Queen in July, quickly leading to his resignation, weeks after Queen fully admitted to lying to federal investigators, court documents show. Weeks prior to that, the seminary had celebrated Queen in an announcement about a new class Queen would teach alongside a prominent Southern Baptist leader, O.S. Hawkins, whom Queen had coauthored a book with around the same time.

With Collins, the seminary suspended the former police chief on May 5, 2023 and fired him on June 8, 2023, Southwestern said.

“The change in the leadership of Campus Police accompanied a reaffirmation and emphasis of the seminary’s longstanding policy to refer immediately all reports of sexual assault to local law enforcement,” the seminary said.

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on social media @liamsadams.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What a DOJ abuse case revealed about SBC seminary's accountability for mishandling reports