Stephanie Butnick: Sarah Posner writes on The Daily Beast that the “media scrum”surrounding the 10 Baptist missionaries from Idaho charged with child trafficking in Haiti is drawing attention to the problem of undersupervised American missionaries abroad. The highly publicized incident illustrates the need for mission organizations to administer more rigorous volunteer background checks, familiarize volunteers with local regulations and perform better oversight. Posner writes, “The exhortation of evangelical organizations such as the Southern Baptist Convention—to go forth to all nations to preach the gospel—can lead to naive or inadequately trained missionaries finding themselves in more complicated situations than they anticipated.”
