Arrested Southern Baptists may be released

Reuters is reporting 10 Southern Baptists arrested in Haiti January 29th could be released Thursday.

Jeff Groenewald of Listen Up TV posits at the Holy Post that the 10 Americans should be cut some slack. Groenewald believes the 10 should be given the benefit of the doubt.  His reasoning is they’ve been tried in the media, Christians are about putting themselves at risk to serve others and the group meant well.

The ends does not justify the means, ignorance of the law even in catastrophic conditions is not a defense. International standards are in place for sound reasons and are respected and adhered to by most groups.

Richard Hall of connexions:

I’m sure their hearts were in the right place and they went to Haiti with the best of intentions. But you can’t just take children. You can’t.

The 10 were charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy.

We do know the group did not act under any national direction from the Southern Baptist Convention, they didn’t have to. With baptist polity of autonomy, SBC churches are free to do their own thing. Some do with so with excellence, some do not.  We now know why residents of Callebasse were so willing to hand over their children. We also know leader Laura Silsby is facing charges in the US.  While some SBC leaders caterwauled all the way to the White House,  many others understood that the focus these 10 do-gooders garnered took life giving resources and attention off the very children they abducted and from the parents who handed them over.  Religion Dispatches:

The real crux of the issue is this: these ten do-gooders walked into the trap many well-meaning white evangelical Christians fall into: those poor brown/black/yellow/red people need My help. Jesus wants Me to help them. To much of white American Evangelical Christianity, the We often means Me. It’s what God Called Me to do. It’s what God would want Me to do. The problem with the Me mentality of much of conservative Evangelical Christianity is that they often can’t see the We—the people of Haiti—who love their kids so much they’re willing to let some white people who claim to be “Christians” take them away to what they promise will be “a better life.”

The focus on Me takes away from the real ways that people in disasters can be helped without the insertion of well-meaning, clueless interlopers into their story. The New Life group is now finding out what living in an impoverished and earthquake-ravaged country is like. Perhaps now they will begin to understand what it means to live alongside the poor, as opposed to swooping into a disaster for a quick “feel-good Christian moment” designed to make them feel better about themselves.

This is hardly the first time the SBC has been caught in a diplomatic and legal quagmire. Dallas Morning News Religion Blog:

Take, for instance, the case about 11 years ago when a team of Southern Baptist volunteers from the Chicago area were detained in North Korea. Yes, North Korea. Unbeknown to most Americans, including rank-and-file Southern Baptists, the SBC has been working–sometimes openly, sometimes clandestinely–in that area for at least a decade and a half.

The case to which I refer to involved a volunteer team much like the one from Idaho, with approximately the same number of people. Well-intentioned, these Chicago Southern Baptists went to North Korea full of idealism. Also like the Idahoans, the Chicagoans were apparently naive about the circumstances in which they found themselves.

And blunder they did. Even though they were warned to be discreet in their witnessing, the Chicagoans stood on street corners in Pyongyang and handed out evangelistic tracts–a great big no-no in the world’s most reclusive communist-atheist nation. That was like waving a red flag in front of a bunch of already-suspicious bulls. North Korean police hauled off the volunteer group and “detained” the visitors for several days, while Southern Baptist bureaucrats worked feverishly behind the scenes–and out of the public limelight–to obtain the release of the Chicagoans.

Reuters:

“The order will be to release them,” the source, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. The decision has not yet been made public.

“One thing an investigating judge seeks in a criminal investigation is criminal intentions on the part of the people involved and there is nothing that shows that criminal intention on the part of the Americans,” the source said.

Whatever happens to the 10, how are the children they abducted doing? How about their parents? Do they have sustenance, shelter, support, safety and mercy?