Southern Baptist Church Sexual Abuse: How Survivors in Arkansas Are Holding Churches Accountable

Most of the people who call me don’t begin by telling me what happened. They begin by apologizing for calling.

That hesitation is the thing I notice first, and it tells me more than the facts do. People remember the facts. What they’re unsure about is whether anyone will believe a church had anything to do with it, and whether saying so out loud will cost them the only community they have ever known. Some tell me the story in the third person, about a friend, and then somewhere in the middle they stop saying friend. Others have carried it since the nineties and have never once said the word abuse to another person. If that’s where you are, you don’t have to decide anything today. You can read about Southern Baptist church abuse claims in Arkansas, close the tab, and nothing happens. Nobody calls you.

A Case Moving Through an Arkansas Court Right Now

Keenan Hord worked as a youth pastor at Bentonville First Baptist Church. In 2023 he pleaded guilty to 13 counts relating to sexual assault, child sexual abuse material, and sexual indecency with a minor, and the court sentenced him to 60 years in prison. Those are convictions rather than allegations, and they sit in the public record where anyone can find them.

In January 2026, a father filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of his son in Arkansas state court. According to court records and news coverage of the case, the complaint names Hord, Bentonville First Baptist Church, the Northwest Arkansas Baptist Association, the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention, along with a block of unnamed John Doe defendants described as including church leaders and insurance carriers. The lawsuit alleges that church leaders knew or should have known Hord posed a danger to minors and failed to act on it.

Look at that defendant list again, because it’s the part most people never expect. A civil complaint can reach past the man who caused the harm and past the building where it happened.

The executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention told reporters the organization had not been formally served and does not comment on pending litigation as a matter of policy.

Why Doesn’t a Guilty Plea End It?

A criminal prosecution answers one question, which is whether the state can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular person committed a particular crime. The prosecutor represents the state of Arkansas rather than the child, and the sentence lands on the man standing in the courtroom rather than on the institution that hired him and kept him there. Nothing in that process requires anyone to open the personnel file, read the complaints that came in years earlier, or account for what somebody decided after the first parent raised a concern. A civil case is where those questions get asked, and it moves on its own track whether the criminal side ended in a conviction, an acquittal, or nothing at all.

That difference matters most for survivors whose abuser was never charged. Maybe the man died. Maybe he’s in his eighties and living four states away. Or a prosecutor looked at the file in 1998 and decided a nine-year-old couldn’t hold up on cross-examination. None of that closes the civil door, and none of it means the church that employed him is beyond reach.

Churches Get Named for What They Did, Not Just for What He Did

In January 2024, my firm and Constant Legal Group filed suit in the Circuit Court of Columbia County against Central Baptist Church in Magnolia and a former youth pastor there. The complaint alleges he groomed and sexually abused a member of the church youth program starting when she was a teenager. It also alleges the church was negligent in hiring him without a thorough background check, that it failed to supervise him, that it never trained its staff to spot and report child sexual abuse, that it didn’t investigate when reports came in, and that it kept him on the payroll anyway.

Not one of those claims describes what the youth pastor did. Every one of them describes what the church did or failed to do.

Negligent hiring is the easiest of them to picture. A congregation meets a personable young man, likes him, and skips the part where somebody actually calls his last two ministries and asks why he left.

Supervision claims tend to turn on access. Youth ministry gives one adult unsupervised time with children, in cars, on trips, over text, late at night, and a congregation that opens that door without watching who walks through it has made a decision it can be asked about later.

Retention is the claim that surprises people most, because it applies after the church already knows. A report comes in, somebody looks into it or decides not to, and the man stays. Arkansas law also recognizes that quietly moving an accused employee somewhere else, without telling anyone at the new place why he’s available, can support a negligence claim.

Then there’s reporting. Clergy in Arkansas are mandated reporters, subject to limited privilege exceptions, and so are school staff and healthcare workers. When a reporting failure contributes to a child being harmed again, it can support a negligence claim on its own. Inadequate training on how to recognize and report abuse can do the same. And a church that concealed what it knew about past abuse can face negligence and fraud claims when the concealment leads to further abuse.

The Letter That Goes Out First

Before much else happens in one of these cases, I send the church a preservation letter.

It tells them to hold everything that could bear on the case, which in practice means the personnel files, the complaint files, the emails, the text messages, the internal reports, the discipline records, the training materials, the visitor logs, the security footage, the phone records, and every note or communication anybody made about the accused person or about the child, and it says all of that in writing, on a dated letter, so that no one can stand up eighteen months later and claim nobody told them what to keep.

What comes back is often more than the church expected to find sitting in its own files. There are prior complaints nobody acted on, internal warnings that went partway up the chain and stopped there, and paperwork showing the man moved quietly from one role into another. The messages tend to matter most, because they read very differently in a deposition than they did on the afternoon somebody typed them.

That letter isn’t a formality. It exists to stop deletion before the files disappear, and once they’re gone, no amount of testimony brings them back.

How Long Do I Have?

Start here, because for a lot of readers this is the entire question.

If you were under 21 on July 28, 2021, meaning you were born on or after July 28, 2000, Arkansas has no statute of limitations on your civil claim for child sexual abuse. None. The Justice for Vulnerable Victims of Sexual Abuse Act abolished it. You’re not late, and you won’t become late.

For survivors who were older than that on July 28, 2021, the Delayed Discovery Statute is the pathway. It gives you three years from the point you discovered the psychological effects of the abuse, which is almost never the same date as the abuse. Plenty of people don’t connect the two until something in adulthood forces the connection, and that’s a normal way for this to surface rather than an unusual one.

Your claim could still be timely, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred. Speak with an attorney to find out.

If you’re weighing whether to talk to anyone at all, it’s worth understanding what to look for when hiring an abuse attorney before you start making calls.

What a First Call Actually Looks Like

If a child is in danger right now, the first call is not to me. Report to law enforcement and to the Arkansas Child Abuse Hotline, because that’s what gets a child safe and starts an official record that exists outside the church. Telling the church can happen after that. A report to a pastor, to a local association, or to a state convention is a secondary step, and it is never a substitute for reporting to the state.

When you do call a lawyer, your privacy has real protection. Arkansas courts commonly use protective orders to shield identifying information, especially where minors are involved, and filings can proceed under initials or be sealed. I’ve never put a client’s name in a press release, or anywhere else, without being told to.

I’ve handled cases against institutions in this state for a long time, including being the first to obtain a significant monetary settlement from the Catholic Church in Arkansas. Institutional cases move differently than most other civil matters. They run on documents, they take patience, and they ask a lot of the person at the center of them.

Calling costs you nothing and obligates you to nothing. If you want to talk with someone about what happened, we can do that whenever you’re ready, and if you decide afterward that you would rather not go further, that’s the end of it.