Non-Negotiable and Repeating: Background Checks and Abuse-Awareness Training

If I could get every church in America to do two things, and only two things, it would be these: run a real background check on everyone who works with children or serves on the safety team, and put them through child sexual abuse awareness training. Then do both again, on a schedule, forever.

Most churches do half of this. They run a background check when someone signs up, file the result, and never think about it again.

That is a false sense of security wearing a paper trail.

Here is why one-and-done does not work. A background check is a snapshot. It tells you what was on record the day you ran it. It tells you nothing about what happened the year after. People who intend harm are patient, and a church that screened someone once and never looked again has a blind spot it does not even know it has.

So we make both of these non-negotiable and repeating:

• State background check, renewed on a set cycle. We run ours every three years, no exceptions, for anyone working with children or on the safety team.
• Child sexual abuse awareness training, renewed every two years. Threats evolve, people forget, and a refresher keeps the whole team sharp on what grooming and boundary violations actually look like.

Notice these apply to the safety team too, not just the children's ministry. We are around kids constantly, we have access most volunteers do not, and we are not exempt from the standard we hold everyone else to. If anything, we should be first in line for it.

This is the highest-liability area in the entire church, and it is also the simplest to defend if you do it right. When something goes wrong and a lawyer or a reporter asks what you did to prevent it, "we screen everyone and re-screen on a schedule, and here are the records" is a very different answer than "we thought he was a good guy."

We do not do this primarily to protect the church from a lawsuit. We do it to protect children.

But hear me on this. We do not do this primarily to protect the church from a lawsuit. We do it to protect children. The liability protection is real and it matters, but it is the second reason, not the first. Get the order right and the policy almost writes itself.

Protect the children first, and the church's legal standing will follow.

To sum up: screen everyone who has anything to do with kids or serves on the team, re-screen on a clock (we use three years for checks, two for abuse-awareness training), and include yourselves in it. Protect the children first, and the church's legal standing will follow. This is the one area where there is no such thing as too careful.

And I know that firsthand. Years ago, one of my own team members was arrested for online solicitation of a minor. Everything we screened for, he had passed. It did not catch him, and I have made my peace with the truth that no system catches everything. But in the worst of it, knowing we had done every check and every training, on schedule, gave me something to stand on. It let me know I had done everything I could. That is a story for another time.