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Parents and Families

“how are the children?”

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How are the Children?In African cultures a common greeting between people from a tribe not their own would be “How are the children?” The idea behind that gesture is that if the children are doing well then the village/tribe is reflective of that wellness. We do similar as you meet an old friend or extended family member they, or you, will often say “How are the kids?” That question means something deeper within ourselves than we acknowledge.

With the events of last weeks Penn State sexual abuse and cover up scandal this question circles my brain and sadly, I cannot give a really good answer to it. With the history of the Catholic church abuse scandal always a possible topic of discussion for the last 15 years, to the weekly abuse by our very own tribe members we call ‘Youth Ministers’ our children are under some serious dangers.

One might say that is an over reaction.. possibly.. but as these are anecdotal incidents we’d be silly to assume they are isolated.

I spent my morning reading the Penn State Grand Jury testimony before I felt I could start to write this. One reason was my own curiosity. I spent some of my young adult & teenage years at Penn State with my sister and best friends graduating from there. It’s a great school and a cool place to be. I loved the tradition of “JoPa” as harkens back to a day of stability and relationships over promotions and successes. So, in a way, I needed to know.. Second reason, I am not a victim of abuse. I have reported people to DHS/DCS in my days of ministry and given witness accounts before, but I felt I needed to know a bit more about what it means to be a victim.

What I read in that report was a, quite disgusting, but mostly alarming was the ability to repeat behaviors that compromised the innocence of children. Over and over again there was the same story from victim to victim and I couldn’t help but wonder, how could this continually happen? It happened, in this case, as seems to be the case with the Catholic church because someone in a position of authority leveraged their trust given to them by others into aggregous acts against some of the most vulnerable of God’s Kingdom.

How then, can we as a church community, a people called “Christian” protect those who are most vulnerable in the Kingdom?

Our church, often throws out the needs for a Safe Sanctuaries policy, based off the works of Joy Melton and a book series by that name. I am not so concerned about you trying to adopt and implementing a policy today, but I do hope you take some time to look over the practices of introducing your teenagers and adults together that minimizes the opportunities for a an isolated or predator behavior to take place.

So what can you do this week with all of this?

1. Assess your policies or procedures that are presently the norm of your ministry.
2. Put into practice new policies as needed
3. Send out correspondence to your families, acknowledge what is happening in the news, don’t be afraid of it, and let them know what elements are there to protect their children.
What are things to assess?
  • Do you have background checks on your people?
  • Do you have a second adult rule for all ministry gatherings?
  • Is there a timeframe that people have to be around the church to become involved with youth?
  • Does someone, or you, interview each youth minister with your team?
  • Is there a reference check?
  • Are there yearly review processes?
  • Is there a response process if a child told you, or another adult, of something indecent that might have occurred?
  • Is there a care process for an after incident?
Having some policies in place can help you in the implementing process of protecting those in the ministry, youth community and outer community. It will also help give some clear direction in an otherwise emotional set of circumstances.
How do you go about creating or starting policies? If you are starting from scratch or need to see what others do you can do what we call an “invisible search” that will help you find files that are posted on servers, but not necessarily on the web. Check out this “safe sanctuaries” search. Download documents as you feel the need and see what others are doing and wordings (change the search wordings if you like).
Train up your people on the new procedures. Start practicing the new safety measures as soon as feasible (ie. two adult rule is easy, background checks take time and money). When you find push back, just assure folks, this isn’t a witch hunt, just something to assure each other and the families that we are conducting our ministries with the best safety practices we can. If the case of Penn State reflects anything, the adage of “we’ve known them forever” is no excuse for putting around protection measures for the ministry community.
Then share with the masses. This might be an email with the every policy/procedure that you’ve implemented this week, it could be a reassurance that you have safe measures in place already and people can trust the ministry, it could be just an acknowledgement of “This has happened and is tragic, we seek to be a safe place for your child to be a participant in the ministries of the church. If you have any questions or concerns about your child’s safety and what we do to ensure that as best we can, please contact us.”
NOTE: the implementation of the a Safe Sanctuaries policy doesn’t eliminate all possibilities of something happening in ministry, but it does greatly diminish the probability. From my personal experience, we had a young adult who’s first act that would red flag him was an assault on a child. We had some implied policies in place, but just finished approving our policies and background checking everyone. What was helpful for us was that we had approached the subject and our people were prepared, as best as could, for such an event. Certainly our reactions were not without various emotions, but our people held together as best as one might imagine for such a thing to happen to a church body.

 

Gavin Richardson is Digital Community Builder for YouthWorker Movement and the Short One at YouthWorker Circuit. He has been in youth work for almost two decades now, has been a writer and consultant on numerous internet and published projects for the church. He’s often a speaker around the country on church communications and community building. His current projects are working on developing online Youth Disciple Groups and finishing a new book “Sticky Sheep.” He is the part time youth guy at Good Shepherd UMC in Hendersonville, TN. If you ask, he will say that he is a “misfit” of the church. He lives in Nashville with his wife Erin, son Brooks and dog Crimson. You can connect with Gavin (and he’s totally cool with that) through http://about.me/gavoweb.

Wild Goose Festival a final gander

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Wild Goose Festival**This originally posted at Youthworker Circuit Blog. Kevin headed up the Wild Goose Festival Youth Community tent where he was able to get folks like Shane Claiborne and Brian McLaren came to share with the teenagers at the event.

When you get right down to it, there are more goose jokes than you might think.

I came into Wild Goose in a kind of hodge-podge, last-second decision kind of way and managed to experience it in a similar fashion. At the outset, I was alerted to its existence by a Twitter mention from Gavin: “@elvisfreakshow really wants to go to this, he just doesn’t know it yet.” It was the end of February, I think. So I headed over to the Wild Goose site, which at the time was less cool and more borrowed looking. I poked around a bit, but apart from a sense that Derek Webb was involved, there wasn’t much information. “Maybe he was kidding,” I concluded.

A few months months and a circus of communication later, I was asked (two weeks ahead of the festival) to lead the youth team. Which, as it turned out, was a bit of a blank page considering how close we were to the festival. My experience of the festival, then, was from the perspective of both insider and outsider. The most common sentiment I picked up throughout the festival from everyone I encountered was that we were all so glad it was happening. I don’t know if any two people came away with the same story; everyone seemed to be moving through in their own way. Two truths: I missed about half of the bands and speakers that I would like to have seen. And I would do it again the same way.

Because I approached the festival as an attendee, I came with my family. Because at the very last I became staff, my family and I had very different experiences of the festival and we were careful to evaluate our time together and apart as we went along, to avoid the former intention being ruined by the latter obligation. Late one evening we arrived at this conclusion that I think pretty fairly sums up the Wild Goose experience: in no other set of circumstances over any other 4 days would we ever have encountered such a powerful collection of moments. And all those moments added up to a sense of worthwhile that is difficult to express.

Ordinarily the event is about, well, the event. The right speakers, bands, whatever. At Wild Goose, it felt like the event was about those in attendance. Conversations you’d have nowhere else. People you’d meet nowhere else. Presenters and performers that were present for the duration of the event. When does that ever happen?

Sure, it wasn’t perfect. There’s probably a mighty check-list being nailed to the wall somewhere as you read this (“#16. Don’t attempt to transition from soul-warming Americana to intimate worship by putting a comic in the middle. #17. Especially if you’ve just passed out 1,000 marshmallows to the masses). But the spirit of the festival was picked up by the crowd entirely; walking the grounds the last day of the festival felt like the last day of a mission trip. Something special had happened. People weren’t streaming for the exits; they were lingering, savoring.

I’m all in for next year; I suspect I’m not the only one who has already Googled, “Wild Goose 2012″ with unreasonable optimism. I’ll be making my case to head next year’s youth team later this week; people seemed to resonate with this year’s efforts–imagine what I could do with more than a week and a half of preparation!

Hope to see you there next time.

Peace,
K


Youth Ministry Release form Flea Market

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Since the fall is coming up and many of a youth ministry is going to be starting that new academic year of ministry you might be in need for updating your youth ministry medical release & permission forms.

I did one of my top-secret search engine tricks and found a plethora of youth ministry release forms for you to check and and pull from in designing your own release forms.

Before that, some thoughts on crafting these pseudo official forms:

  1. Many times these will not protect you from a lawsuit if something goes horribly wrong. Even if you have a covenant of conduct type list that is signed off on the youth ministry could still be charged with some lawsuit. It is a good defense piece, but it doesn’t stop someone from seeking some legal system consequences. You will see some, ‘release from liability’ on some of the forms posted here. That is just wording, especially since injury many times happens during negligence, not all, but in many cases & then liability can be brought up again.
  2. Since they are not some official legal documentation, what are they? Many times they stand as a written document that reflects a single decision. If a youth needs to go to the hospital the hospitals will take you as a guardian and let you sign for stuff, but any real decisions are not considered covered under that one decision on paper. So you will need to be in constant communications with actual parents in those scenarios.
  3. This is your best avenue for getting contact information. Since this in many ways is an official document (though as mentioned, not legally binding) your parents will give it greater attention to filling out and turning. So put in there all the contact information you think you will need.
  4. Have photo releases if you plan on taking pictures of your youth community. If you are taking photos and using them for Facebook, website, newsletter etc. then it is best to have a photo release portion of your form. You can do it where people initial they are okay or have an opt out statement (we are going to use youth photos for X, Y, Z. If you do not want your child reflected in this sign below…).
  5. Designate for a specific time period. I used mine for a full year & would put in that this covered week to week and special church specific youth retreats. I would put them all into a folder and take that where ever we went. This didn’t keep me from needing to get releases for some of the ministry companies (short term missions camps, concert retreats, etc.) but it does help stand in for those in between times when you go off campus or just as a church group.
  6. Get a photo copy of the child’s insurance cards. You can put the insurance numbers on your release forms for people to fill out, but hospitals want to see that insurance card. It helps to as those group id, policy number, prescription code, can get mixed up really easily.
  7. Notarize: If you want to bring a little more legitimacy to your release form you can get them notarized. If one of the parents in a notary then they can come to the meeting prepared to stamp various documents. I wasn’t always sure of the value of the notary versus waiting on people to get me the information. So I often opted out of the notary portion to make sure I had the information in hand as soon as possible. Usually for the big trips they had their own papers which required notaries, so we were covered there.

Release Form Flea Market: Now, I really didn’t pull some top-secret thing to get these. Found these with google search as people had posted on the net and some folks gave me a few. Pull from these forms whatever you like. Best thing to do is not just do a cut and paste job or a ‘save as’ without going through the document. It still needs some legitimacy and having the wrong date or church name is a big Ooops! We put all these into a zip file for easiest use.