Friends and Safety:
FGConnections Summer 2005
Where Might Jesus Stand?
by Christie Duncan-Tessmer
The
Junior Gathering and High School Programs at the annual Gathering of Friends
have always been a full week of a wonderful blend of fun, spiritual growth
and Quaker community. These programs hold their children in a loving, challenging
way that creates an environment for getting “deep and funky with the
Spirit” as one young Friend put it. The experience is easily comparable
to that of adult Friends’ workshops at the Gathering. I’ve heard
stories of children as young as two looking forward all year long to the children
and adults that make up their community at the Gathering. High School students
and Adult Young Friends at planning meetings for the Gathering introduce themselves
and say they’ve attended 10, 15, 20 Gatherings!
So when Friends General Conference needed to make changes in our hiring procedures to include more extensive reference checks and even background checks on those volunteers serving in supervisory positions, I was concerned about how to implement the changes without damaging these trusting, loving communities. I’ve heard the same thoughts voiced in monthly meeting communities. The experiences, ramifications and by-products of FGC’s work on these issues may be relevant to them as well.
Keep the focus on safe community
In order to get deep and funky with the Spirit, the children need to be safe. They need to be physically, spiritually and emotionally safe. We talk about confidentiality when worship sharing with children; we’re careful not to talk about the horrors of war with the little ones; and we create a set of circumstances so that children are unlikely to be hurt by their caregivers. These are all ingredients to creating a safe, trusting environment.
It’s the safe environment that we need to talk about in our meetings. Working through the details of procedures in committees and talking about the policy with Friends can, I’ve found, quickly become a conversation about the minutiae of the rules. This turns our rich, spiritual experience into a bureaucratic, paperwork driven, other-directed experience in a minute. It’s important to watch out for this trap. When in a meeting someone says that we are doing background checks on paid staff and checking references because the insurance company says we have to, I stand and suggest that we reframe that statement. We are taking reasonable steps to maintain our loving, safe community.
What Would Jesus Do?
A Friend in my meeting asked: If Jesus walked in through the door of our meetinghouse and wanted the little children to come unto him, what would we say? “No! Where are your references and background checks?” In a Society that wants to create a world of peace, such suspicion seems to be a poor place to start. I hear Friends expressing grave concern that ideals we value such as trust and forgiveness are dismissed when we take up background checks. I agree that there is certainly potential for that to happen. However, I also know that the perspective we take and the way we frame our words and actions makes the difference.
For example, the insurance company asks us to provide a training for our staff on these issues. They offer a video that can be used for the trainings. It gives lots of information, statistics and images that make clear the dangers of the world. Rather than using it, we are developing our own workshop. The FGC workshop for volunteers working with children will review all of the information about the rules. But the larger part of the workshop will be worship sharing on topics of recognizing what creates a safe, loving environment and what our role is in that. In this way we’re recognizing and responding to both the real dangers of the world and building a shared understanding of what kind of trusting, loving community we want to live in.
My feeling on the whole Jesus-andbackground-checks question is that in fact Jesus, or “that of God,” does walk in through the door of our meetinghouse every day. And we welcome it. But that of the world sneaks in too and we need to be able to respond appropriately to both.
A friend told me recently that in Japanese culture, when something very important is said, the speaker says it three times because it often takes hearing a new idea three times before one is able to absorb it. The topic of background checks and guidelines about interacting with children has been coming up in the FGC office for a long time. Each time we started to wrestle with it we had so many questions and doubts that it seemed an impossible task. How can you make rules for interacting with children and enter into a meaningful relationship with them at the same time? We had Friends from 28 states, Washington DC and Canada serving on the Junior Gathering staff in 2004. How would we do state background checks on all of them? Would volunteers refuse to participate in the screening? Wouldn’t we be giving a message of mistrust? Wouldn’t our focus on such dark topics and rules change the whole tone of the program? We would make some headway and then have to let it go for lack of answers. Because of our having addressed the topic in conversations already, when the requirement to institute such policies came from the insurance company (along with a mechanism for obtaining background checks from most states via the internet) we were able to hear the request and make some changes.
The process of laboring with all of the questions raised in this article and integrating the safety procedures into our programs have actually been a positive experience for us at FGC. I’m clear that our programs will benefit from the scrutiny they’ve received and the attention to all levels of safety for our children.
FGConnections Summer 2005 Home
