Safe Church Team Network Evening 2023
The third Safe Church Team Network Evening was held on Tuesday, May 23 at the Ministry and Learning Centre in Macquarie Park. This event was a wonderful opportunity to continue in the equipping, educating and inspiring of local church leaders as they seek to implement safe church practices in their context. Thankyou to the over 120 people who were able to attend in person and online!
The evening featured a presentations by Sam Burnett and Sarah Ryan from Prolegis Lawyers, Nathan Croot from Jefferson & Shea Legal and also Jonathan Bradford, Standards Manager for the Baptist Churches of NSW and ACT all related to responding to legal claims within your church. We also heard from representatives of the Office of Children’s Guardian speaking on available resources and from a local church pastor who with his church has navigated historic claims and the important considerations in this.
We hope to hold more of these Safe Church Team Network Evenings, to encourage and support the work of Safe Church Teams and to facilitate churches working together.
Safe Church Team Network Evening 2022
The second Safe Church Team Network Evening was held on Tuesday, May 24 at the Ministry and Learning Centre in Macquarie Park. This event was a wonderful opportunity to continue in the equipping, educating and inspiring of local church leaders as they seek to implement safe church practices in their context. Thankyou to the over 200 people who were able to attend in person and online!
The evening featured a presentation by Janet Schorer, the NSW Children’s Guardian on the Child Safe Scheme that we as an Association of churches have been preparing for but came into effect on 1st February 2022. This presentation reinforced the benefit of a local church adopting the Safe Church Package of Model Documents and submitting a Safe Church Health Check application (both available from this CSS website under the Safe Church Health Check menu).
The evening also included a presentation about historical abuse data in our NSW Baptist context. A final presentation was also included considering options for data management in churches.
We hope to hold more of these Safe Church Team Network Evenings, to encourage and support the work of Safe Church Teams and to facilitate churches working together.
Safe Church Team Network Evening 2022 Introduction and Devotion
Safe Church Team Network Evening 2022 Session 1
Safe Church Team Network Evening 2022 Session 2
Safe Church Team Network Evening 2021
The first Safe Church Team Network Evening was held on Tuesday, May 11 at the Ministry and Learning Centre in Macquarie Park. This inaugural event was a wonderful opportunity to equip, educate and inspire local church leaders as they seek to implement safe church practices in their context. We were overwhelmed by the support from our churches with around 250 people engaged both in-person and online.
The evening featured an update on the Child Safe Standards from Sam Burnett from Prolegis Lawyers, an overview of public liability insurance cover from Tim Williams from Baptist Insurance Services and information about the Reportable Conduct Scheme from our Ministry Standards Manager, Jonathan Bradford
Most excitingly, we heard from Safe Church Team members at Gymea, Gordon and Forbes Baptist Churches about how they have implemented the Child Safe Standards in their local church context. These three churches represent some of the diversity of our movement; the small rural community in Forbes, managing hundreds of volunteers in Gymea, and navigating safe church issues across multiple languages in Gordon.
We hope to hold more of these Safe Church Team Network Evenings, to encourage and support the work of Safe Church Teams and to facilitate churches working together.