Deconstructing Church

Yesterday (19th November 2023) was Safeguarding Sunday, a day marked for reflecting on safeguarding across churches in the UK. I spoke for The Ordinary Office, sharing my thoughts and a bit of my expertise in the issue. Here is the text below:

Today is Safeguarding Sunday. We talk an awful lot about safeguarding here at The Ordinary Office, and it is a hot topic in the Church of England in general. But, how many of us actually truly understand what safeguarding is?

There are many definitions of safeguarding, but one I really like from The Care Act is this.

“protecting a person’s right to live in safety, free from abuse and neglect”

I really like this because it is expansive, encompasses many different facets of safeguarding and centers on the person as the subject. One of the major problems with safeguarding that I see is where institutions think it is about reputational control, placing victims and survivors in the role of collateral damage.

Abuse takes many forms. In safeguarding training, we usually focus on financial, emotional, and physical abuse, although in recent times the recognition of spiritual abuse is becoming more and more mainstream. In addition, neglect includes the neglect of individuals by other individuals, but also the neglect of individuals at an institutional level. One worker can be neglectful, or an entire organisation can have a culture of neglect. Nothing illustrates this more than the recent case of an inpatient suicide at a mental health hospital while the staff on duty plaited each other’s hair.

Whoever we are, however we meet eachother, however our paths cross, we have a duty of care for eachother. The Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God, that whatever we do for eachother we do for God. God is in the stranger, the ‘other’, that really annoying person who lives down the road, that person of the opposite political persuasion who makes your skin crawl. God is in all, loves all. Everyone has a right to the kin-dom of heaven. This is fundamentally safeguarding. Protecting each other’s right to safety, respect and positive treatment. This is bringing heaven here on earth, today, now.

Sadly, we are human, (or perhaps not sadly …) and fallible, and treating everyone like we would our nearest and dearest is exceptionally difficult when they don’t think the same as we do, don’t look the same as we do, understand the world in a very different way to the way we do. When Jesus said ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, the often missed part of that quote is the ‘as thyself’ part. Would I want to be treated as lesser because I am white? No, so why would I treat someone else as lesser because they have different colour of skin to me? Would I want to be treated any lesser because God gave me my James to love? No, so why would I treat anyone else as lesser because God gave them someone of the same -or no- sex to love? And yes, God is in all relationships, gay, queer, bi, ace, all. Would I want to be treated any lesser because I have children? No, so why would I treat anyone else as lesser because their families are different to mine? Love thy neighbour as thyself.

Safeguarding is ultimately about treating everyone as you would wish to be treated yourself, as a person you value. And, as an aside, I have been the person who doesn’t value themselves, so I recognise the challenge there. We all deserve to know how loved we are, feel how beloved we are, revel in the amazingness of our individuality. As Christians, as churches, we should be building eachother up to heaven, not tearing eachother down and condemning us to hell.

I pray, this safeguarding Sunday, you will be filled with a passion for safeguarding in a way you never thought possible. That stale policies will be imbued with the richness of possibility. That it becomes a joy to take individual responsibility for sharing the gifts of a positive safeguarding culture with whomsoever you meet. And while we wait for the institutions of Church to catch up, I pray for the exiled, the abandoned, the suffering, the rejected and the lost. The kin-dom of God is bigger than a building or a network of buildings. WE are the Church and WE can decide to love, recklessly, outrageously, liberally. As Jesus did. Amen.