Honoring Our Families:
A Safer Church Policy Development Guide
David K. Popham, 2007

Local UCC congregations across the United States are being asked to keep faith with parents and grandparents, guardians, aunts and uncles, and all those adults who bring children or allow their children to come to our churches by developing policies and procedures to reduce the risk of sexual exploitation at church facilities and church sponsored events. The goal of safer church policies is to honor our families by moving toward environments and events that have been assessed for the risk levels they present and then working to reduce those risks.

Often in our congregations we let slip by those practices that we hold school districts, youth recreation programs, and youth development programs too. We would not send our children or grandchildren to a YMCA that didn’t perform background checks as a matter of policy. We would oust a school superintendent if she announced that as long as a person had a heart for children no fingerprinting would be required before allowing this person unsupervised access to our children.

Yet, that is what tends to happen in the local church. We are desperate to find the pied-piper youth leader and so do not want to scare her/him off with red tape. We are short on Sunday school teachers, and feel relieved when we find a substitute, even when we do not know much about that person who is new to the church. We are family with one another and feel that conducting a background check and forming safer church policies are an affront to our close ties.

However, a search of state newspapers revealed the following for the first eight months of 2006. In Colorado a linguistic doctoral candidate, a day-care owner, an attorney, and military personnel had all been accused and convicted of sexual assault. In Utah a medical doctor, three adult female high school workers, and an internet café manager were accused and convicted of sexual assault, and a religious bookstore owner was under investigation. In Wyoming a high school girls’ basketball coach, a certified nursing assistant, and a correction officer had all been accused and convicted of sexual assault.

The alarming element is that as a pastor I would welcome any number of these folks into my church’s children and youth ministries. Why would I distrust teachers or a high school coach? Suspect an attorney? He might have given us some free legal advice. Doubts about a doctor or certified nurse - don’t they embrace the Hippocratic Oath?

For this reason it is important to remember what the experts tell us: public life is no indicator of personal behavior. Predators, especially those who prey on children, go to great lengths to set up a double life: a public life that often encompasses community leadership; and a private, hidden life involved in problematic behavior which threatens the wellbeing of children.

The same experts also deem churches to be high risk environments due to attitudes actively fostered in religious communities including:
• thinking the best of every person in the church
• easy forgiveness
• over confidence in deterrent through detection
• ministers and lay leaders participation in the invulnerable myth: “that happens elsewhere, but not here”

Anna Salter, a revered personality in the field, says that worship centers are about the last major social institutions to react to the threat of sexual predators. According to Salter, churches become targets for predators for there is no other place where they have as easy access to children as a local congregation.
This guide is written with the smaller church in mind. Larger churches may wish to download the document The Time is Now! Guide to developing abuse prevention policies at www.ucc.org/ministries/safe. This document from the national UCC is written with larger churches in mind whose primary avenue for developing safer church policies are through committees or task force. It would not be a bad idea to have this as a reference even if your congregation is smaller.

The present document Honoring Our Families assumes the task of policy development and implementation will fall primarily to one or two individuals in the church. The information that is provided below is not exhaustive and cannot be assumed to contain all acceptable safety measures. Additional measures may or may not be needed according to specific settings or exceptional conditions.

STEP 1
Raising awareness as to why safer church policies are no longer on option but a must. Some reasons include:
• keeping faith with parents/guardians concerning the safety of their children
• the prevention of ruined and broken lives
• public embarrassment of a local congregation
• lawsuits claiming a church did not do all it could to be a safer environment
• the ability to attain sufficient liability insurance without a written policy in place
• the UCC Insurance Board liability insurance will not cover churches without a safer church policy in place, even if you are paying for the liability portion of the insurance (please speak with your insurance representative concerning the conditions of liability coverage)

STEP 2
Have the church governing body appoint a team or person to be responsible for developing safer church policies. This group or person should also be invested with the authority and finances to gather in resources that may prove helpful, and should be expected to bring updates to the governing body on a regular basis.

From the National UCC setting:
• The Time is Now! Guide to developing abuse prevention policies www.ucc.org/ministries/safe.
• Making Our Churches Safe for All www.insuranceboard.org
• A generic version policy suitable for use by local congregations and readily adaptable may be found at www.ucc.org/ministries/safe/SafeChurchPolicy.pdf (note it will take Adobe Reader to open this file, which usually can be downloaded for free from the internet)

From the Rocky Mountain Conference UCC:
• Safe Sanctuaries for Children and Youth: Reducing the Risk of Abuse in the Church by Joy Thornburg Melton (with video or dvd)
• Books
Identifying Child Molesters: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse by Recognizing the Patterns of the Offenders by Carla van Dam
Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders - who they are, how they operate, and how we can protect ourselves and our children by Anna C Salter
Protecting Your Children from Sexual Predators by Leigh Baker
• Ensuring Safer Camps: A Rocky Mountain Conference, UCC Camp Director Resource
for Assessing the Risk Levels of Questionable Counselors (while this guide expressly deals with camp settings and dynamics it is a good general introduction to predatory behavior)
• Reducing the Risk: Making Your Church Safe from Child Sexual Abuse, a video from Church Law & Tax Report

Other General Resources:
• Christian Ministry Resources, part of Church Law & Tax Report at www.churchlawtoday.com
• Reducing the Risk (a video program) and resource site at www.reducingtherisk.com
• Volunteer Select Plus at www.volunteerselectplus.com. Click the best practices link to the left of the screen. You do NOT have to be a subscriber to access this link.

STEP 4
After review of the material make a list of the scope of abuse risk management for you congregation. This list will be different for each individual congregation but should include:
• The issue of background checks for employees and volunteers
• The issue of buildings and grounds
• The issue of a sexual abuse policy and safety guidelines
• The issue of a protocol for reporting abuse
• The issue of liability insurance and proper coverage

STEP 5
Work through the list you have drawn up for your local setting.

5.A Background Checks
As of the winter of 2007 the Parish Life and Leadership Ministry Team of the national setting of the United Church of Christ is working to implement a mandated background check for all people placing profiles into the UCC system. At the present there is a “gray area” time when some profiles already in the system appearing without the background check while new profiles are appearing with the background check. The Rocky Mountain Conference, with some profiles already in the hands of local congregations, will require all incoming profiles to include the mandatory background check in the summer of 2007. Please call the Conference Office with questions about background checks for ministerial candidates if a profile appears without one.

If you seek to hire a minister who has not placed a profile through the UCC system it is imperative that you conduct a background check on the individual, for “backdoor” candidates sometimes skew the system for the purpose of hiding information.

As a matter of policy background checks should also be conducted on all other employees and those volunteers who work with your churches various ministries and programs. This does not have to be an expensive process. For example a minimum membership fee with Volunteer Select Plus, or other company that provides the same service, will allow you to perform individual background checks beginning at $6.50.

Due to the prevalence of liability lawsuits involving houses of worship, insurance companies are now indicating that anyone involved in any capacity with a church or ministry at a church (children or adult) should have a background check completed. There are suggestions that as a matter of policy everyone involved in the life of a local church should have a background check completed. Certainly given the ease with which predators infiltrate churches this suggestion may need to be a reality in the near future.

Background checks are a firm and solid way to deter disreputable personalities from seeing your congregation as an easy mark. Also, background checks inform the community that you take the safety of their children seriously and make it a priority in the life of your church.

5.B Buildings and Grounds
Take a tour of your facilities and grounds with a person on the church governing board. You will want to note where people can be hidden from sight as these are places where sexual abuse can take place. For example all doors and parts of interior walls should have windows in them. The goal is to create a safer church building by reducing places of privacy.

This may seem counter-intuitive for churches that seek to create safe places by providing privacy for counseling, etc. However, the church is primarily a public building, adding vision-access to closed off spaces serves to enhance the understanding that we gather as a community, not as individuals.

In smaller churches this is often a difficult goal to accomplish as the expenditure for interior windows and new doors can be frightening. However, the expense of one liability lawsuit eclipses the minimum cost of bringing your buildings and grounds up to date to increase the safety of your children and youth.

5. C Sexual Abuse Policy
There are examples for this in the Safe Sanctuaries series, from the UCC Insurance Board, and Addendum One of this publication. This policy should include definitions of sexual misconduct and harassment:

Anne Salter defines sexual misconduct with minors as “Any contact or interaction between a
child and an adult in which the child is used for the sexual stimulation of the adult or another
person. Including touching and non-touching such as inappropriate language, showing or
displaying inappropriate images, and displaying or asking children to watch sexual acts.”

The Rocky Mountain Conference policy defines sexual harassment as “Any attempt by an employee
or volunteers to coerce a person into a sexual relationship, or to subject a person to unwanted sexual attention, or to punish a person for refusing to submit to a sexual invitation. Harassment may involve
a wide range of behaviors from verbal innuendo and subtle suggestions to overt demands and physical abuse.”

An explanation of who is being held to the standards of the policy and a statement of protection that outlines the standards should also be included. It is helpful to have a lawyer look the policy over to ensure you are within the parameters of state laws.

As Part of the abuse policy safety guidelines are to be explicit, and may include:
• The two adult rule - no less then two adults supervising an activity
• The open door rule - rooms with minors to leave their doors open
• The random checker rule - an adult who randomly walks through the buildings to check on bathrooms, children and youth rooms, and other places that are closed off to sight.
• The six month hospitality rule - asking volunteers to be a part of the church for six months before working with children or youth
• Abuse prevention training

5.D Reporting Procedures
You may work diligently to reduce risk and increase safety in your church yet an allegation of misconduct occurs. At this time it is too late to decide what course of action is best. Far better off is the congregation that already has procedures in place. This allows the congregations to be timely in its actions and keeps the church from doing the wrong thing, even if for the right reason.
• Who is to do the reporting?
• What authorities need to be contacted
o Local Police
o Liability Insurance Company
o Conference Office
• Inform accused of accusation
o if employee suspend with pay until investigation is complete
o if volunteer remove from activities until investigation is complete
• Do not conduct a personal investigation of your own
• Support the victim and the family of the victim

Again, it is a good idea, to have a lawyer review your protocol to ensure compliance with state regulations.

5.E Liability Insurance
This is often a difficult issue for older members of a congregation to understand. Through most of their life, churches and other charitable institutions were protected from lawsuits as the services they provided a community was understood to outweigh any harm that an individual may experience. Today, however, that is no longer the case. Charities and churches may be sued for liability and misconduct and when they are, may find their liability insurance too little to pay the settlement.

In recent years congregations have been sued for:
• Hiring Negligence - the failure to conduct a background check or to follow proper application procedures
• Supervisory Negligence - the failure to properly screen, train, and supervise volunteers
• Reporting Negligence - the failure to properly report suspicions or accusations of sexual misconduct

It is worth the trouble to review your liability coverage keeping certain dynamics in mind:
• Does it cover employees and volunteers?
• Is it a reasonable coverage, i.e. will it pay in full any settlements against the church?
• Does it cover incidents on and off church property?
• Does it cover vehicle use?

A candid discussion with your insurance agent is warranted. Do not be shy about making sure you are adequately covered should your congregation be involved in a liability lawsuit.

STEP 6
Write a draft copy of a safe church policy. It is a good idea to invite comments and feedback not only from the church governing board, but also from the congregation as a whole. This helps to facilitate church ownership of the policy, allows for public discussion and critic, and enables the congregation to be empowered when the time for a formal vote arrives.

STEP 7
Present the policy for a vote before the appropriate church body. Depending upon the local congregation’s by-laws this may be the church governing board, a committee (such as personnel), or the congregation itself.

STEP 8
Implement the policy.
• Mail a copy of the policy to every member and friend of the church
• Perform background checks
• Begin making your facility a sight-accessible and public facility
• Plan training meetings for employees and volunteers

STEP 9
Follow up.
• Make a calendar for where things need to be 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after implementation
• Decide how often your church needs to revisit the policy
• Decide on the regularity of training and re-training sessions

The need to write a safer church policy is indeed a sign of the times, however, by doing so we keep faith with our families that we work to ensure the safety of their children and loved ones.

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