Deconstructing Church

As a Music Therapist, as a Teacher, as a volunteer in faith circles, I have lived and breathed safeguarding for almost twenty years. I am the kind of person who overthinks every conversation, who always worries if I did the best I could and who is anxious about the consequences of getting things wrong. Of course, we all make mistakes sometimes, and I’ve had a fair few occasions to reflect on my actions to learn for future experiences.

This should not be unusual to anyone who works with other people. Especially in caring or care-adjacent roles. When we work in faith-based organisations, we have to understand that often, a care-adjacent role is exactly what we have. How many people in our churches are of an age where social or family care is necessary? How many are children? How many are surviving extreme traumas or life transitions. I’d suggest in an average congregation more people would be termed as ‘vulnerable’ in any given period than not.

When we serve or minister to people in any way, we are treading on the edges of a complex story. Illness, strained family relationships, court cases, redundancy threats, abuse survival, bereavement, money worries. Combinations of the above. We never interact with people as blank pages. There are already a multitude of lines drawn which interact with the ones we come to place, and influence the final picture. This can be a good thing, as we add a little highlight here, or smooth out some shading there so that section can forever be left alone. Or it can be a bad thing if we ignore the impressionist masterpiece which has gone before and just draw our own cartoon shark anyway.

As consecutive safeguarding scandals rock the Church of England, and challenging reports are submitted to the Methodist Church, as the Catholic Church faces challenges in reform and Vineyard conducts investigations behind closed doors, how can we as Christians ensure we’re doing our part?

The key here is that safeguarding is the responsibility of every single person within our communities. If someone discloses to us, if we observe something, we must act. As yet mandatory reporting is not in place, but if we are truly living Christ’s call to love our neighbour, we can do no less than act when we become aware of need. It is always better to have three reports which turn out to be nothing than no reports about an incident of abuse.

If we took this approach, large-scale cover-ups could not happen. If we took this approach, patterns would be revealed. If we took this approach, we would build a culture of positive safeguarding and those ‘bad apples’ we so often hear blamed for systemic failures would have nowhere to hide.

There are times people knew things which, if acted upon, may have saved me from a lot of pain and difficulty. This is more common a tale than you might think. We need an entire shift in attitude about safeguarding eachother, in love, against the worst parts of ourselves. Abusers are not monsters who hide in the shadows. They are everyday people, in plain sight in our communities where nobody believes them capable of hurting anyone. Under the right stressors, they could even be you.

If we learn one thing from the current safeguarding mess, let it be to make noise. See something which unsettles you? Speak to your safeguarding officer. Experience an unsafe environment? Speak to your safeguarding officer. We can be agents for change in our own communities. Any teacher will tell you if you tackle the low-level behaviour, escalation can be avoided. Safeguarding is the same.

We have to stop worrying about tarnishing reputations, for if there is nothing to answer for all will be well. We have to stop being concerned about ‘being in fine standing’, as that won’t matter if something happens you could have prevented. Concerns you raise which have reasonable explanations won’t haunt you. Concerns you don’t raise which later turn out to have been indicators of problems? They will.