Our church has recently experienced something that shook us to the core. A 40 year old man who grew up in our church and for all the world appeared to be an upstanding Christian person was put in prison for 39 counts of rape and child molestation. NO ONE would have guessed this of him. The molestation has been going on for at least the last 4 years and more than likely, much longer than that. There are two girls involved. One his own daughter, the other is the daughter of his best friend. It's a very, very sad situation.
I am not telling you this to belittle our church in any way. In fact, I think that we, as a church, have handled this impressively well!
I am very proud of all of us, but won't go into anymore detail.
The reason I am telling you this is simply for background information. Now here is my real question: I am on the Administrative Board at our church. We had a big discussion the other night about what steps we could take to further safeguard our children from things like this. Please understand that none of what this man did happened at the church. So my feeling is that the safeguards are already working, but we want to make sure we are doing everything we can do.
At this point, anyone who works with children in any capacity fills out an application form to start with. And then, the rule is that anytime a child is in a room, there must be two adults or more in the room with them (for S.S., VBS, Children's Church, Nursery, etc.) Never is one adult ever allowed to be alone with a child or children. We also have ushers who patrol the halls during the times that the church is open to make sure that nothing ever goes on, as well as to make sure that no one is ever able to slip in the back door and take a child aside in a room.
I'm not sure that there is much more that we can do. We are discussing the idea of doing background checks on anyone who works with our kids before they are allowed to do that. My personal feeling on that is that 1) I think it's a knee-jerk reaction to what has happened recently and 2)
Even if we did background checks, it will not necessarily insure that we will keep our kids any safer. The man who is in prison right now had no prior record of any kind. And in addition to that, what about the people whose records get expunged??
So what kinds of safeguards do your churches have in place? If you do do background checks, can you share which company it is that you get them done thru?
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