Grace and peace to you all in the name of our Lord!
I just wanted to take a moment to give you all an update on our kid's ministry, to review where we've been and what's next.
As you all know, we met on June 9th to discuss some concerns regarding the safety and protocols of our kid's ministry. Since then we've been busy having several conversations, reviewing documents, looking at procedures (ours and other churches), doing the SBC abuse online training, and more, seeking the Lord's guidance and bathing all of it in prayer.
Here's some information that I hope you will find helpful:
- I have appointed Sara Rader as our safety coordinator (per the training's suggestion) due to her own education and training. She will work with staff and workers and parents to help with the overall security and safety of our kid's ministry. This will also help Nikki tremendously due to her limited time as a part-time staff member.
- We are working to finish new policies and procedures complete with a reporting plan and volunteer vetting.
- As part of the new procedures we will do a yearly training, as well as have online abuse training for our kid's ministry co-laborers in the gospel. This is actually something our insurance is now requiring.
- We had hoped to have those procedures in your hands already but we do not want to rush it, and felt it was better to have them done well rather than quickly. So, our goal is to have those in your hands within the next two weeks, by July 19th. That does mean we will not have these ready for the upcoming member's meeting.
- Our further hope is that we will implement these new procedures in August, with all current kid's workers being trained in the first month or two of the new school year. Again, if we can't begin this well, we will err on the side of doing it the way it should be and so that could push it to September. Until then, we will keep working with the current policies and procedures we have, making sure we give attention to those practices that ensure our kid's safety.
We do want your feedback and we also realize that course corrections are always doable. We may discover that some of the procedures aren't enough or are too much. We can always adjust as we walk through it together. The big thing we want to emphasize is patience with all and with the process of implementing change, which takes time in an established church with many moving parts.
We also plan to have another meeting to discuss these policies and answer questions, but the problem is my voice. I want to wait on that meeting until I can speak publicly, and I just don't have a firm date when that will happen. In truth, the struggles with my voice have been part of the delay in getting some of this already done. I am sorry for that but it's beyond my control. Again, we are working hard on this but ask for your continued patience.
In Christ,
Pastor Brandon