Rooted is providing a worksheet to help you create a child protection policy for your church. We hope this resource supports your children’s, youth, and/or family ministry as you serve students.
Early in my youth ministry experience, I saw two youth leaders (one a volunteer and the other a paid youth pastor) in my local area face charges of inappropriate conduct toward teenagers in their ministries. Seeing those events play out so early in my ministry career broke my heart for the teenagers involved. I resolved before the Lord to have an eagle eye for the teenagers in my care, and as far as it depended on me, to appropriately vet and train prospective youth leaders.
In Matthew 18, Jesus expresses how protecting the young and vulnerable among us aligns with God’s heart. After speaking to the disciples of his love for children, Jesus says to them: “’If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.'” (Matt. 18:6, NIV). Surely encountering abuse of any kind at church would cause our students to stumble. Our efforts to protect them, therefore, are part and parcel with the gospel we proclaim.
Safeguarding children and teenagers in the church begins at the policy level. As church leaders, this is our first step toward shaping a culture of physical, emotional, and spiritual safety in our communities. Following are some steps you can take to create and implement a child protection policy for your church.
Engage Necessary Stakeholders
Policy changes in the church are not for the faint of heart. They can be tedious and multi-layered, and policies are unlikely to have staying power without the investment of key stakeholders. If you are thinking about updating your church’s policy, you’ll want to collaborate with senior leadership right from the start. Depending on your church’s polity, this could include a lead pastor, executive pastor, elders or deacons, and anyone else who holds sway in leadership decisions. Consider reading Depak Reju’s excellent book, On Guard: Preventing and Responding to Child Abuse at Church with this team of leaders to convey the importance of a child safety policy.
If this team blesses you to lead the charge of policy change, you’ll also want to recruit key leaders responsible for overseeing children’s, youth, and family ministry to the cause. These are the people who will have to carry out the policy along with you, so it’s important to bring them on board with the vision of protecting children and teenagers at your church’s programs. Consider setting a standing meeting every couple of weeks in order to help you stay on track with action items and to ensure that everyone is on the same page with the process.
Review Your Church’s Insurance Requirements
Oftentimes, the church’s insurance policy may provide the impetus for updating a child protection policy. When I was serving as a family pastor, I had wanted to make updates to our policy but wasn’t sure where to begin. Then our insurance company notified the church that our child protection policy needed to be updated in order for us to retain our coverage, prompting the process for me. If you review your policy’s requirements—perhaps with your senior pastor or executive pastor—you may find some guidelines for what you ought to include in a policy.
One caveat about insurance companies: Remember that their goals for a child protection policy are slightly different than your own. The insurance company wants to avoid paying a claim due to negligence or poor planning. The youth or family minister, on the other hand, writes and implements the child protection policy primarily for the spiritual reason mentioned above—to safeguard the hearts and minds of vulnerable members of the church family. Any document or outline your insurance company provides will likely be a good starting place for understanding best practices and what to include. But in some cases, you will want to go even further in your efforts to protect students than the insurance company requires.
For example, insurance policies typically recommend doing background checks and reference checks for all adults working with minors. Consider adding another layer of protection by implementing mandatory abuse awareness training. This serves to educate your team about appropriate boundaries and warning signs of abuse. It also makes serving with your ministry less appealing for someone with predatory intentions. (Ministry Safe and Protect My Ministry are two reputable options for training and background checks.)
Another example of going above and beyond insurance requirements is planning for those times when students and leaders are away from the church campus—summer trips, camps, and retreats. These situations are obviously different than a classroom setting, so provide additional training and clear guidance for leaders about appropriate interactions with students.
Consider Consulting with a Licensed Church Attorney
An attorney licensed in your state and specializing in church law can be a tremendous asset to your policy process. He or she can field questions, recommend additional safeguards to consider, and review your policy to ensure the language will offer the necessary protections. For example, you will want to include a permission form allowing you to seek medical treatment for students when necessary, and an attorney has expertise in what language will be most appropriate.
A church attorney can also advise you regarding the appropriate reporting process for suspected abuse in your state. If your church can afford it, having legal counsel on retainer provides a helpful first call in the event of reported abuse or safety incidents.
Get Feedback from Youth and Children’s Leaders and Parents
Just as you want to recruit the leaders responsible for overseeing children’s and youth ministry to share your vision for child safety, it’s helpful to engage the “boots on the ground” in these areas—those who are serving children and teenagers directly as well as trusted parents in your community. As you talk with these church members, you will want to address practical considerations like checking students in and out of church programs, and for younger children, diapering and bathroom trips. It’s important that the leaders involved in carrying out these procedures believe your policy changes are ones they can execute practically on the job.
These valued leaders can share important feedback regarding your current staffing, physical spaces, and other logistics that may influence how you carry out various aspects of a child protection policy. Brainstorming with them to find solutions will go a long way to ensuring your policy can be implemented and sustained. You may realize, for example, that in order to achieve the best practice of having two adults per classroom at all times, you will need to make a major recruiting push for more teachers. That’s helpful intel to have before you finalize your policy.
Implement Policy Changes
Once you have finalized a new child protection policy (with buy-in your church leadership, youth and children’s staff, and lay leaders), it’s time to implement the policy throughout the church’s ministry. Take a copy of the policy and highlight those areas where you need to work toward compliance. You may find you need to take a large number of leaders through sexual abuse awareness training, or to create a system for updating background checks annually or every-other year.
You will certainly want to have every person serving with youth and children in your church read and sign the new policy. It may also be helpful to hold a meeting for your ministry teams to walk through the policy with them, specifying where they may need to update their current way of doing things. Put a note in your calendar to review the policy with other key stakeholders annually to assess where you may need to make adjustments to ministry practice.
Sadly, not everyone in your church will see the importance of implementing a child safety policy. I have experienced that even the most trusted, godly leaders will sometimes push back about the necessity of things like abuse awareness training or thorough reference checks. You may hear feedback to the tune of “We are a family. Child abuse could never happen in our tight-knit community.” When you are faced with comments like these, it’s helpful to remind your team that Jesus urged the disciples to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves (Matt. 10:16). We never want to assume the worst of people, and yet we do need to be sober-minded about the realities of living in a sin-torn world.
Pray Continually
The task of protecting children and teenagers in our churches is one that we must ultimately entrust to the Lord. We need his wisdom to know when to speak up and when to intervene in a situation that doesn’t feel quite right. We trust in Jesus to shepherd the students in our care, and to work through our ordinary lives as we share the gospel with them (2 Cor. 4:7).
As you labor to create a culture of safety and care in your church, make it a point to give Jesus any anxious thoughts you carry for your students. He is able to guard them in spite of our human limits to do so.
If you are working to build bridges between youth and children’s ministry in your church, Rooted has a mentorship cohort that can help. Consider applying for our family ministry mentoring program today.
