Dear Church Leader,
Thank you for considering the Safe Church Health Check.
Baptist Churches of NSW & ACT are committed to modelling the love of Christ by promoting physical, emotional and spiritual safety in all we do. We have prepared this Safe Church Package to assist your church increasingly become a place that promotes the wellbeing of all people. We strongly encourage you to consider the contents of this Package and to use the material provided to prepare your church for the Safe Church Health Check.
The growing number of recommendations and legal requirements may leave you feeling apprehensive or overwhelmed. The Safe Church Health Check will support you to navigate these challenges. In supporting churches in ministry, we have sought to provide suggested structures and resources to reduce the burden on you. However, your local church leadership will need to take some steps to implement these Safe Church practices as appropriate to your local church context. We encourage each local church to delegate this important task to appropriate individuals. The church pastor is not necessarily required to undertake these tasks themselves.
The work of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Royal Commission) has emphasised that members of the public, children, young people, parents, carers, families and communities should be confident that organisations working with children provide safe environments.
The Royal Commission recommended 10 Child Safe Standards which collectively show that a child safe organisation is one that creates a culture, adopts strategies and takes action to promote child wellbeing and prevent harm to children and young people. On the 1st of February 2022, the NSW Government introduced a Child Safe Scheme which makes implementing the Child Safe Standards mandatory for organisations that provide services to children. The ACT Government has indicated that it will also be implementing the standards in future. Accordingly, the Safe Church Health Check has been designed to assist churches to comply with the Child Safe Scheme.
In addition to mandatory implementation of the Child Safe Standards, churches have existing legal obligations when it comes to providing activities and services to children and young people. For example common law and statutory duties to take reasonable precautions to prevent child abuse, mandatory reporting, reportable conduct, obtaining WWCC/WWVP clearances and obligations to report to police.
Safe Church Health Check is a comprehensive review tool which will assess your church’s safe church practices against identified minimum standards for compliance with these various legal duties. Of course, mere legal compliance is not our aim, rather we hope to promote a culture that reflects the love of Christ, loves and protects individuals, and fosters missional engagement with local communities.
Further, Baptist Insurance Services strongly recommends the completion of the Safe Church Health Check as a valuable risk management and audit tool.
There are a range of resources relating to the Safe Church Health Check available on our Creating Safe Spaces webpage:
www.creatingsafespaces.org.au/schc
If you have any further questions please contact our Safe Church Coordinator James Oosterveen on
schc@nswactbaptists.org.au
Rev Jonathan Bradford
Ministry Standards Manager
James Oosterveen
Safe Church Coordinator