Ideas for April: Safe Church
Any month is a good time to focus on safe church ministry, but April provides some special opportunities to connect with your congregation.
Rachel Boehm works as a healthcare administrator in the field of addictions and mental health. Rachel is a safe church representative for All Nations CRC and serves on the Safe Church Committee for Classis Eastern Canada. Rachel worked for many years as a professional communicator, writer and editor and is passionate about using social media to contribute to individual and collective learning, development and health. Rachel lives in Fall River, Nova Scotia, and is author of the children's book The Ways I Will Love You (www.facebook.com/TheWaysIWillLoveYou or http://www.orcabook.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=748)
Rachel is a mother of four who loves to spend time with her children. Rachel is an avid runner and a freelance writer, and she loves good books and spending time at the lake or ocean.
Any month is a good time to focus on safe church ministry, but April provides some special opportunities to connect with your congregation.
What keeps me from sitting down in other people’s circles? What stops me from listening to the voices of people different from myself?
Abuse concerns us all and needs to be addressed by us all.
Respect is the hallmark of healthy relationships in the home and in community. Expect respect to ensure personal safety and safe churches, homes and communities.
Are there warning signs in a relationship?
Recommended steps for child safety this summer.
The Circle of Grace curriculum teaches children and youth how to identify and maintain appropriate physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual boundaries; recognize when boundary violations are about to occur; and demonstrate how to take action when boundaries are threatened or violated.
If you think that sex trafficking doesn’t happen where you live, think again.
In a recent blog with Rhymes with Religion, Boz Tchividjian asserts the need for seminaries to provide formal training for church leaders in preventing and responding to child abuse.
The Advisory Panel Process has been put in place to support Christian Reformed congregations in responding to church leader misconduct.
Thanks, Bonnie! Yes Circle of Grace is an excellent curriculum! Check it out on the Safe Church Ministry website http://www.crcna.org/SafeChurch/education-best-prevention.
Thank you, Mark, for sharing these words. There are still so many topics we have a hard time discussing in our church families, including disability, divorce, abuse, addiction and mental illness,...
Most certainly, respect knows no boundaries! Everyone needs it and deserves it. However, in this blog I am specifically trying to draw particular attention to a big concern in many of our...
Peter, what a beautiful story! Thank you for telling I!
Thanks for the link to additional resources, Mark! This is an important issue. Many parents with children and adult children living with disabilities have told me that abuse is a big worry. So I...
As mentioned in my blog, that reference is taken from the from Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault:
http://kyasap.brinkster.net/Portals/0/pdfs/Disabilitiesandsexualassault.pdf
...Good point. I've made that edit. Our goal is raise awareness that domestic violence occurs in Christian families as well. Thank you for your feedback.
Thanks, everyone, for participating in this conversation. This dialogue encourages me to think of this topic from many different angles. I, for one, will be more careful to use statistics that...
Thanks for your feedback! Although statistics tell us that the majority of abuse, especially physical and sexual abuse, is male against female; it certainly goes both ways. In fact emotional abuse...