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By John Dart
“I’m still
amazed,” declared Mary Alice Gran, the soft-spoken national director
of children’s ministries for the United Methodist Church based in
Nashville. “Not all our [regional] conferences require background
checks for volunteer workers, and there are congregations who are
still doing nothing.”
Gran said this omission is surprising
since a Methodist-published how-to book, Safe Sanctuaries:
Reducing the Risk of Child Abuse in the Church, came out in 1998
and has been followed by a flow of educational materials from the
UMC board of discipleship.
That
situation is common in all kinds of Protestant churches, experts
say. The “do-nothing” approach may stem from budget problems, from a
trust in fellow believers, or from a tradition of respecting each
congregation’s autonomy to make its own decisions, including on
issues of safety. The latter reason was the principal response this
spring from national Southern Baptist leaders to news reports about
Southern Baptist ministers and seminarians with a record of sexual
abuse.
Public
attention to the sexual abuse of minors in the church has focused
largely on the Catholic Church. But enough cases of sexual abuse in
Protestant churches have surfaced in the past decade–sometimes
resulting in costly legal settlements—to cause alarm.
Insurance policies now require
background checks on clergy, staff and volunteers at churches and
church-related organizations. Some mainline denominations in recent
years have obtained discounted insurance prices for their churches
and organizations by contracting with companies competing to sell
their investigative skills to churches.
“The background check business is huge,”
said Phill (cq) Martin, deputy CEO of the 50-year-old National
Association of Church Business Administrators. More than 100 firms
advertise in the “suppliers guide” on the NACBA Web site (www.nacba.net).
“The problem with these services is that they are not all created
equally so you have to really understand what you are purchasing,”
Martin said.
Among mainline Protestants, the most
popular company appears to be Oxford Document Management Co., based
in the Minneapolis suburb of Anoka, and launched in the early 1990s
by Sally Johnson, then the attorney for the Episcopal Diocese of
Minnesota.
Oxford is not an NACBA member but the
small firm’s clients include some 90 Episcopal dioceses, 56 synods
of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, at least 13 United
Methodist conferences, a half-dozen Catholic dioceses and four
African Methodist Episcopal Zion districts aside from assorted other
church bodies and seminaries.
Early this year, the United Church of
Christ and the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) signed on with
Oxford after nearly three years’ work developing procedures. “We
have already screened over 500 clergy in just the first two months
between the two of them,” said Chuck Koterba, director of client
services. And as of April 1, Oxford became the national vendor for
the Church of God, Cleveland, Tennessee.
Screening the backgrounds of clergy,
which included even Katharine Jefferts Schori, who was elected
presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church last year, costs an average
of $225 per clergyperson, depending on how much research a client
wants, Koterba said. The costs are much lower for staff and
volunteers.
Some congregations, like All Saints
Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, draw virtually all staff and
volunteers from within the parish. “We have seen their lives,” said
Carol Anderson, rector at All Saints. For clergy hires, Anderson
said, the parish uses Oxford for background checks and, in addition,
interviews all the people listed as references. She said she just
learned of another parish’s “bad mistake with an earlier call.”
Fortunately, that church was able to “buy him out” after six weeks,
she said.
“It is very hard in my experience to get
references and other folks to tell the whole story on someone,”
Anderson said. “They think it seems ‘unloving or unsupportive’ to do
so.” She said she believes the Episcopal dioceses are now
establishing protocols to get other diocesan people to “raise any
red flags that might be there.”
The
companies look not only for sexual abuse violations but also for
other convictions, driving violations or financial problems. In
2000, the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta canceled the consecration of
a bishop a week before the event because church officials learned of
his planned separation from his wife and of his credit-card debts.
Concerns for safety have added new
tensions to the hiring atmosphere at churches. “We get extremely
nasty notes at times from a lay leader or a chief elder who comments
on our audacity to question an individual’s character,” said
Oxford’s Koterba. “It’s as if people never read the news or realized
what’s going on.”
Church groups known to be strict on
issues of personal behavior have not escaped scandal, even though
those same religious bodies also tend to admonish members not to air
dirty laundry in public.
Recently,
16 current or ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses settled nine lawsuits in which
they said they were sexually abused as children by Witness
members or leaders. Details have been kept secret, but the
settlements were announced May 10 by a watchdog group,
SilentLambs.org, concerning the alleged victims and the Watchtower
Bible and Tract Society of New York. Most of the cases were in
California.
"For once, we have the church stepping up
to the plate and having to settle with these victims," said William
H. Bowen, founder of the support group that focuses on victims who
claim to have been molested by Jehovah's Witnesses. Mario Moreno,
the Jehovah's Witnesses' associate general counsel, confirmed the
settlements May 11 but said he could not reveal the monetary amounts
because of a confidentiality agreement.
The Southern Baptists were
spotlighted in an ABC News 20/20 program in April on
preachers who are predators. They found 10 SBC ministers who were
convicted of sex offenses against minors, six of whom were still
listed as clergy on an online directory at SBC.Net at the time of
the broadcast. They included:
+ Garrett Dykes of Calvary
Church in Wetumpka, Alabama, who pleaded guilty to molesting an
8-year-old girl.
+ Larry N. Neathery of Westside
Victory Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted of 25 charges
of sex abuse of five boys.
+ John O. McKay of First Baptist
Church, Hondo, Texas, currently serving a 10-year sentence for
sexual assault.
Another firm specializing in churches
is Protect My Ministry, which serves mostly conservative evangelical
church organizations. “We are averaging 70 to 100 new clients each
month,” said Mike Clark, the CEO of the Tampa, Florida, area company
with 17 full-time staff members.
Protect My Ministry works with many
individual churches in addition to serving the Colorado Springs
headquarters of Christian and Missionary Alliance. It signed a deal
last year with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Some Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.) presbyteries also are clients.
Clark and his chief marketing officer,
Brad Snellings, are both active in Southern Baptist congregations.
Their SBC clientele include staff and missionaries of the
Atlanta-based North American Mission Board, as well as employees of
the Kentucky Baptist Convention and the Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
He said his office had not (cq) been
contacted, as of mid-May, by national Southern Baptist leaders who
are under pressure to develop a stronger response to disclosures
about sexual offenders in the ranks of clergy and youth ministers.
SBC president Frank Page told reporters in April that some kind of
internal national directory of clergy was being proposed. The issue
is expected to arise at the SBC annual meeting June 12-13 in San
Antonio, Texas.
“I remember reading that Baptist leaders
have told all churches they ought to do background checks,” Clark
said. “A lot of churches say, ‘We don’t do it; we know everybody.’”
Clark, who has worked in the screening field since 1993, issues the
same warning his competitors do – job applicants and church
volunteers who have a disturbing past work hard to hide that
background with relocations, aliases or just plain lies.
He commended an article on background
checks that appeared in the spring issue of the National Association
of Church Business Administration magazine, written by two West
Coast women with law-enforcement experience. Sandra Brewer and Chris
Felicijan, who head Pinnacle Investigations, in Spokane, Washington,
emphasize that databases are limited compilations from 19 states,
often not up-to-date and lack federal court convictions – to mention
only some the gaps.
Contracting for the lowest level of
background check is risky, they say. Courts that hear suits filed by
victims expect that churches will exercise “due diligence” in
researching an employee’s background. “It is nearly impossible to
explain to a jury that saving $20 by using a limited screening
service makes you exempt from a multi-million dollar judgment,” the
co-authors wrote.
“It is imperative that you work with an
agency that conducts court record checks in all locations where the
applicant has lived,” they said. A large church in the Midwest lost
a $100,000 lawsuit when the background company only checked the
current location for the applicant, who had a history of assaulting
others.
Brewer cited the case of a church that
hired a children’s pastor after doing a simple database check. Only
two months before he applied for the job, the pastor had been
arrested for sexual assault of a child, she said. “The pastor was
hired, raped a child in the new church, the court ruled that the
hiring process was negligent, and the church settled out of court
for $250,000.”
Felicijan noted that people who have
received deferred sentences or who engaged in plea bargains to
receive lesser charges may elude background searches. Moreover, a
person may have used an alias, a professional or married name in
addition to his or her given name. “We start with Social Security
records and go to several different databases and actually go to
courthouses at times,” she said.
What about churches with a hundred or
more employees and volunteers who plead poverty when asked to pay
for background checks? “We sometimes suggest that they ask their
volunteers or applicants to pay that cost themselves, explaining
that this is how we can keep children safe,” Felicijan said. “That
works for some churches.” (The firm’s price for a check on a
volunteer or non-clergy staffer is about $26 per person.)
Church
leaders realize that pursuing background checks is a delicate step
for congregations tackling the task for the first time. Gran, the
Methodist children’s ministries specialist, provided tips in the
March/April Interpreter magazine. She advises that
congregations raise the issues of safety gradually in discussions,
soliciting ideas among established groups in the church.
“Pastor John” and “Miss Nancy who has
worked in the nursery for 40 years” should be the first to permit
background checks on themselves. “Their example makes it easier for
others to say yes,” she wrote. If a church cannot afford screenings
for all in the first year, she suggested devising a plan to cover
everyone over a period of three years.
Church
safety consultant Jeff Hanna, who has conducted seminars for NACBA,
said in an interview: “I hate to be blunt, but the bottom line for
churches is that they want it cheap and easy to use.”
“And
actually, that’s not all bad,” he added. “So many churches are not
doing these checks at all, so those who reach out and find a company
to conduct them are ahead of the game.”
Hanna,
president of Iowa-based Ministry Continuity Solutions, said, “No
company can claim that they can guarantee a 100 percent accurate
check because so many municipalities and states simply don’t supply
the data completely.” While not discounting the value of
more-than-minimal background screening, Hanna said that many
churches have “a false sense” that such efforts will be enough.
“Equally
important,” he said, is having written guidelines that call for
reference checks, interviews, solid supervision, training and –
and if it comes to that – reporting the offense to proper law
authorities.
The
Chicago presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has
guidelines dealing with both child safety and clergy misconduct.
Hired to help churches connect with background-check services is
Loretta Gratias-Bremer, a Christian educator whose title is
consultant-coordinator for misconduct prevention. “I say there is no
right way or wrong way to do it; please just do it,” she said. “It’s
worth every penny to keep people safe.” |
