By Kirk Petersen
An Anglican Communion commission has issued Safe Church: How to Start, a 27-page booklet responding to a need expressed at the 2022 Lambeth Conference for basic, practical guidelines on addressing complaints of abuse, and on creating a culture of safety.
Members of the Safe Church Commission pointed out in a November 20 global press conference that while some parts of the Communion have had formal safe-church processes for many years, in other countries, habits and cultural norms are less supportive of victims of abuse.
“Many bishops, both formally through the Lambeth Call on safe church, but informally, requested resources,” said Garth Blake, an Australian who chairs the commission. “Where do we start? We don’t have anything or we don’t have much. We don’t have any sort of culture around safeguarding — there’s a culture of silence. How do we begin? And so that launched us into developing resources.”
The new booklet, the first of a series of resources, is available in multiple languages at the commission’s website. It provides step-by-step guidelines for provinces and dioceses to create a safe-church team with broad representation — including a lawyer, a survivor, a theologian, and others. The team will develop a process for responding to disclosures of abuse, tailored to the specific culture or jurisdiction.
Further steps to prevent abuse include widespread safe-church training, developing a code of conduct, and introducing background checks for clergy and others.
Over the years there have been cases of abusive priests leaving one jurisdiction and finding work in another, starting a new cycle of abuse. The booklet outlines a protocol for sharing information about ministry suitability across the provinces of the Anglican Communion, covering 165 countries. The province providing information and the province requesting information would both keep the information confidential, except where disclosure is required by law or to avoid the risk of someone being harmed by the church worker.
The booklet also has an extensive discussion of the theological grounding for safe-church work.
“In provinces and countries where safeguarding, as a concept, is not legislated, is not known, is not part of the everyday language, it can be difficult to introduce the idea. And it can feel like a foreign concept, and it can feel like something that’s imposed from the Western world, because it is something that is already legislated and has been placed for 20 years or more in places like the U.K. and Canada and Australia,” said commission member Kim Barker, a safeguarding consultant from South Africa.
“We have a responsibility as leaders to care for the faithful, and policies and procedures of the safe church are good for all of us,” said the Rt. Rev. Cleophas Lunga, Bishop of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe, and a member of the commission. “They do protect everyone. First, they’re protecting the vulnerable, of course. But also, secondly, it will protect those whose duty it is to care for the vulnerable.”
Mandy Marshall, the Communion’s director for gender justice, said the commission will be developing a series of training films about forgiveness and reconciliation. These are core Christian values, but “I think sometimes churches can be naïve in saying, our perpetrator said he’s sorry. So therefore, you need to reconcile and restore the relationship with the person. We have to remember that some perpetrators can be quite crafty,” she said.
The training films will provide guidelines for assessing whether a perpetrator is truly repentant and willing to be held to account.
