143: Best FREE Resource For Church Sexual Abuse Prevention & Response With Kris Buckman & Brad Eubank

In this crucial episode of the Small Church Ministry Podcast, we delve into a vital topic of preventing and responding to sexual abuse within our church communities. 

With guests Pastor Brad Eubanks and ministry leader Kris Buckman, we’re spotlighting an invaluable, completely free resource that offers comprehensive support and guidance for your church.

Whether you’re a volunteer, ministry leader, or pastor, you can help make your church a safer place for all and help build the trust of your community as well. 

Tune in to discover how to use this free resource to make a meaningful difference in your church’s approach to abuse prevention and response.

Get the Essentials To Prevention & Protection: https://sbcabuseprevention.com/ministry-toolkit/

Join our free Facebook Community: www.facebook.com/groups/smallchurchministry


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Transcript

Laurie Acker: 0:01

Hey, this is Laurie Acker, welcome to the small church ministry podcast. Hey, welcome back to another episode of the small church ministry podcast, where we cover everything small church, from leadership to volunteers, ministry, Health, Ministry, specific ideas, strategies, all in the context of churches with less than 200 we are really working to turn the tide on a lot of false beliefs in church culture that have told us for a few decades now that if your church was healthy, it would grow a number, that bigger churches and bigger programs mean better ministry, and we know that that is not true. In fact, healthier small churches have a way of meeting some real needs that big churches cannot meet, at least not in the same way, smaller churches have an opportunity to see everybody who walks in the door, to develop welcoming and safe spaces where everybody is not only seen but also valued. And really, we talk a lot about doing ministry Jesus style, where one is just as important as the 99 So on today's podcast, I'm super excited to welcome Chris Buckman, who's a denominational leader in youth and kids in the states of Maryland and Delaware. We also have pastor Brad eubankon, who's the senior pastor at peddle, First Baptist Church in Mississippi, and they are here to specifically to talk to us, share with us, tell us why we need to grab this free resource that is available to every single small church on the planet. This resource has the potential to make small churches safer from sexual abuse, not just for children's ministry, but honestly, all ages, going into youth and even vulnerable adults. So if you are joining us as a volunteer, a ministry leader, a pastor, a denominational leader, a council member, just please stay tuned to learn about this resource so that you can be proactive in working toward protecting your church, your leaders, your members and anybody who enters the door. So after that long intro, welcome Chris and Brad. Hey, hey,

Brad Eubank: 2:04

thanks for having us.

Laurie Acker: 2:05

I'm so glad you're here as before we jump in, I want each of you to tell us a little bit about you, why you're passionate about this topic, and what you hope to see change in churches who actually access it and utilize it. So who wants to

Kris Buckman: 2:18

I'll go first Laurie. I'm Kris Buckman. And as go first? you said, I serve in the Baptist, Southern Baptist world in the state convention level. And I serve as the youth and kids missionary. So I work with, we have about 450 churches in our state convention and so I work with people who lead ministries on how to do all kinds of things, but more recently, a lot of policy writing making our churches and our ministries safer for children, for students, for vulnerable adults, and so just a heart for that. I grew up in a small church my whole life. Served in a small church for over 20 years, and just saw the nuances and the naivety of doing ministry and thinking that if we run one background check, we're good to go to run a safe ministry, and just knowing what I know now, what reality is out there, it's just my passion to get out to these small churches to say that is not enough. And let me tell you why. And here's what you can do to make your search a much more safer place.

Laurie Acker: 3:25

Yeah, and this is so important because so many of us, until we are touched by a tragedy or become aware of it, we think we don't need this. This doesn't apply to us. And let's not get to that place where we're like, Oops, where we're going backwards instead of moving forward. So Brad, you want to introduce yourself?

Brad Eubank: 3:45

Yes, absolutely. My name is Brad Eubank, and again, I'm lead pastor at pedal first Baptist. I had a privilege to serve with Chris on the air ITF for the last two years the abuse response implementation task force, that nice, long word for the Southern Baptist Convention, to help us address this particular issue. I've also done the same in the state of Mississippi. I chaired that team as well in Mississippi to help us get these reforms and prevention and response efforts off the ground. And so I'm also a survivor of sex abuse, of clergy sex abuse, so I have a sincere heart and a desire to see the tide shift in this regard, we continue to encounter people who continue to say, this is not an issue. This is not a problem in our convention churches or outside of our conventional denominations, which we know that it is. There is no lines that are not crossed when it comes to sexual abuse, whether it be from a clergy member or a volunteer, whoever it may be. And really, I think one of the things that motivates me the most, and similar to what Chris said, is that we want to really reach the small church audience, because we know and understand what is really the normative sized church in most of our churches across the United States is they're way below 200 in fact, probably 150 to maybe 175% of churches are probably. Somewhere around that size. And so our heartbeat was really to provide a resource that was free, that was easy, that was accessible, that was plug and play. They didn't have to do tons of preparation ahead of time that provided them all the things that they would need to get off the ground to help make their church the safest place on planet Earth. That is our heartbeat and our goal. And so we think this resource will really help begin that process in churches. You

Laurie Acker: 5:26

know, I love that you just said, help make the churches the safest place. Because sometimes when we're talking about policies and procedures, and, you know, being proactive, it's not the most fun part of ministry, you know, and it kind of gets put on the back burner. And sometimes when people bring in, well, the schools do this and, and, you know, this is what the law says people get, like, their hair start to stand on end, like, well, that's the school. And I'm like, we should be better than that. Like, the church should be safer than the schools. The church should be safer than the law says this church should be the safest place on the planet. So I love that you just mentioned that. So tell us about this resource and why we need it.

Brad Eubank: 6:08

Wow, that's a great that's a good long question. We'll about trying to make it as short as we can. Here's what I would say, I think. And we called it essentials, because we think we've narrowed down trying to figure out what does it look like? Because it's an overwhelming, daunting task. When you say you need to have policies procedures, you know how to respond. And people go, where in the world do I even start? And so we tried to make it as simple and as easy as possible. And so we kind of broke it down into five simple steps that we want to encourage churches to take. And they can do that so easily. The website is, by the way, which I know you'll put in show notes, I'm sure. But SBC Abuse prevention.com, SBC Abuse prevention.com, and any church can use it, doesn't be Southern Baptist. Any church can use it, it's, it's, it's got some Southern Baptist nuances in it. But by and large, everyone can use and access this material. And it's broken down into five steps. The five steps are train, screen, protect, report and care. And so we lay out in each of those, I'll let maybe we'll walk through kind of what those look like, but, but those five steps are how we can walk through each of those steps. And sometimes churches will tell us, especially small churches will tell us. And I've, I've been in those churches. I have, I've pastored a small church. I have, in the last year, been in small churches who have asked me to come and help them try to understand this topic and why they need to do it. And here's what I hear already. We know everybody. We're mostly all family. We only have a few kids, and that only happens in big churches. But in my experience, the churches that I've dealt with, by and large, are smaller churches. That's so it's it's a misnomer. That's the case. The other thing that I was talking to a small church pastor about a year ago. I said, What would it take for your church to say I need to put something like this in place? And he said, Well, if somebody told us we're going to lose our insurance. I said, Well, that's a great that's a great that's a great thing, and it's important thing because insurance these days and it can continue to move towards requiring churches to have these kind of things anyway, so we might as well get ahead of the curve and make sure we have these kind of policies and procedures in place. But what I said, but fear only motivates us so far. Yeah, right, because we think it won't happen to us. But what we discovered is we tell churches, did you know that 90 to 93% of perpetrator, or of sorry, of survivors and victims know their perpetrator, and all of a sudden they go, Wow, I never, I never knew that. I didn't think about it that way. And so in fact, when you look at that statistic, all of a sudden the narrative is flipped. And all of a sudden we realize that perhaps small churches are the greatest target, because that's where the barriers are often the lowest. The trust factor is the highest. And so we don't often look and we don't pay attention as well, and we just assume that things are okay, because I think I know someone, the problem is what a perpetrator looks like is not what people think a perpetrator is not the snurly old man in a van, a white van by the park with candy handing out and screaming that I'm a I'm a pedophile. They are, unfortunately, people just like you and me and their normal, regular people, men and women alike. And so we, we know this is an absolutely needed, necessary necessity. We see the statistics. We just I'd only usually deal with Southern Baptist churches when those cases arise, the ones that I'm involved in, and those are numerous, but there's so many more that we don't even know about that happen. And if you take that and multiply that, the other thing we know, too, by the way, is, and I'll let Chris jump into I'm sorry, I talk a long time. I get preacher and go a long time. The stat tells us that 16 to 20% only 16 to 20% ever ever report their abuse to

Laurie Acker: 9:52

That is crazy. So that's a current statistic, which would be 87%

Brad Eubank: 9:58

of the abuse that happens. Never disclose their abuse. Never disclose it. So if you take that number now, so I'll just give you one other stat that's shocking, and stats we know can fluctuate and can change, but when you just kind of get the sobering reality, and I've got in front of me, from 2021 from CWA reported of that, 147 children every single day in America are sexually abused, on average. That's 53,528 in the year 2021 and that is just cases that were reported to CPS and that were actually investigated. So if you think about that number of 53,000 and you take and add 80% of that, if you, if that's anywhere close of a ballpark, just add 50% more to that. You're talking 100,000 children every year in the United States of America, and then some of those, they're happening inside of our local churches, and nobody knows it. The other problem is, it takes 10 to 15 years on average before survivor ever reports their abuse. I was one of those. I was almost 10 years before I realized, starting when I was eight years old, I was 17 before I realized what exactly had happened, and told somebody and got some help. Some people, though, take it to the grave. And so that is the the thing, if we could scream it the loudest, this is not a woke issue. This is not a cultural issue. This, flat out, is a gospel issue. We are commanded by Jesus to take care of the vulnerable. He says, If you cause one of the little ones to stumble, better for a millstone to be thrown around your neck and thrown into the depths of the sea, so we don't have an option. Quite frankly, we are disobedient to the Lord. If we that's a strong statement if we do not have these kinds of things in place in our churches. That's the bottom line.

Laurie Acker: 11:47

You know, I love I think it's a Maya Angelou quote that says, now that we know better, let's do better. Because, as you're talking about, you know that, that most of the perpetrators you know are people we know. You know, I'm 54 so when I was a kid, what, what I was taught was stranger danger. Stranger danger, if there's a stranger, there's danger. And then it changed to ask first people don't talk about Stranger danger anymore. But I think one of the things that holds us back as small churches is we want to trust people like I want to have that fairy tale that I can trust everybody that I know. But the truth is is there's wisdom in discretion. Also, Chris, do you want to speak a little bit to this about what you see, like, why some churches hold back or or really don't feel the need, and what we should be screaming louder? Yeah,

Kris Buckman: 12:37

well, I think in my time as a children's ministry director for so long, what we kind of notice is it usually falls on their shoulders to take care of this matter. And so the first thing they'll do is they'll hop online and they'll be like, Okay, where do I need to look for some policies? I need to look for some applications. What do I need to do? And they start Googling, because it's a huge job when you get into it, when you really start looking into it. And for small churches, usually the people are unpaid volunteers. They have another full time job. And so the add this onto everything just seems daunting. And so from my experience, is pulling from all these different places is takes a lot of work. And so what we as a team did was we did all the work for you, and we pulled all of the best of the best together and put it all in one nice package for churches. And so that was really our goal, again with the small churches. To say here we've done all the legwork for you. You just need to go through these modules, follow the next steps and take your time getting through it, and you'll have a good system in place for preventing abuse and not only preventing it, but responding well to it. We know that that's been a big issue, because a lot of times when I go to a church and I look at their policies and procedures under what they do for response is a phone number to the local, you know, Child Family Services number, but that's not enough just to have the phone number in there. There's so much more that goes into responding to it. And so we really worked hard to develop a step by step response plan that churches can follow. And we've discovered, as you go to a church and you kind of present the material to them, you can just see the relief on a pastor's face knowing, hey, we're going to give you a step by step response plan that you can tailor to your church. It's almost like a fire drill. So like when this happens, you put your hands on it and pull it out and that, and everyone falls into line and knows exactly what to do, because it's in those moments of crisis and chaos that we make mistakes. We try and we think we're doing the right thing, but inevitably, we're making things worse. And so we want churches to learn from other churches that have been through this. And so just putting this together, this resource together, was just huge to say here we've done all the work for you. Just take this and watch it. Read it however you're gonna absorb the material. Go and follow the next steps in each module, we've tried to make it very basic and very simple for the small church.

Laurie Acker: 15:07

So you talked about sometimes we feel like it's overwhelming to put something like this together for a church that's looking into putting together like a proactive, prevention, response, kind of plan, what are we looking at? How much, how much, how much brain space do we need for this? How much time, how much support? Talk about what that really looks like? Because I think it can be simpler than a lot of people make it out to be.

Brad Eubank: 16:05

So we call it the 555, plans. What we call it, we wanted you to get five leaders in your church. So this is not designed to take your whole church through. This is designed just take five leaders. So let's do so let's just say, in a church that's running 200 you got somebody that helps with children in preschool, maybe there's two different people. You got somebody helps with youth, paid or unpaid, the pastor, a deacon, an elder, a parent. If you happen to have a counselor or a lawyer, you could bring all those people in, some of those kind of people, and take the five steps we've mentioned, the train screen, protect, reporting, care, and take time to go through each of these sessions. They're all video based you can use. And so I've had a pastor say, Well, do I need you a bunch of preparation ahead of time? No. I mean, you literally can go to the website, start the video, and play it for your group, and then it gives you the next steps and the facts frequently asked questions for each session. And so the first three sessions are about 15 minutes a piece on the video side, and then gives you time in a group to discuss, hey, what do we need to do next? Who's going to take care of what? And then we just encourage you to take five months so it's not overwhelming. And say, we got to do all this today. We're going to do a, you know, and you can do a all day thing, or a two hour retreat and figure it all out, maybe. But the goal is we must give you time to process and think through, to ask questions, to access the resources that are needed in order to maybe find policies and procedures or a group that's going to do your background checks, or whatever the case may be. And so it just says, five leaders, five steps over five months, and after that, five months is up. We really believe that you could easily have a very implementable process to prevent and also, as Chris mentioned, respond well to abuse. And then the last piece, this, the care piece, is something I'll be honest, I think is very new in churches understanding our call to minister to those who've experienced sexual abuse because they're in our pews and our chairs every single Sunday, stats are as high as somewhere around this ballpark of 25% of your congregation has experienced sexual abuse. What are we doing to minister them? How are we going to help them? And so we tried to provide some resources. We literally that you'll love this one other piece that we have in the care piece. In the care piece, it literally we have a guy by the name of Brad Hambrick who is a counselor, and he literally role plays. How do you talk to a survivor if you encounter one in your church and is experienced abuse? How do you talk to a perpetrator that is in your church. How do you communicate to your church? And so literally, it's it's designed where a pastor can just literally plug this in, or a church leader can plug this in and say, here's what we need to do, here's the steps we need to take. And so we want churches to care well for survivors of abuse that are inside, so we provide some resources to help them do those things as well. So again, it's just a really, it's not perfect by any means, but it's certainly, as we believe, is well packaged and put together, that is not overwhelming. It's not intimidating. It's not that long. Again, the first recession is 15 minutes a piece. The second two, because you got a lawyer involved, it lasts a little longer, of course, this about 30 minutes or so. And then the last section of care, which we believe is so critical, it's also about 30 minutes or so, so you're talking a total time right of an hour and 45 minutes of videos that it's going to take to actually watch, and then this in between that you're doing the next steps to develop policies and procedures, to select a group to help you provide sexual abuse training and awareness, because that's a critical piece of helping your churches know. How do you recognize and so Chris, I'll toss it to you. That's a critical piece of helping churches this awareness training. What does that look

Kris Buckman: 19:41

like? Yeah. So each of the five modules that we've talked about, like Brad says, has a video component, and the first one is train as we just talked in the very beginning of this podcast session, and Brad threw out a lot of statistics about the why we should be concerned about this. We really feel that everybody who serves as a leader in your church, and especially with kids and students, needs to know the why behind it. They need to know what it is they need to be concerned about a lot of people have no idea any of this stuff. They just volunteer to serve in kids ministry because they think it's going to be fun, but in order for them to take your policies and procedures seriously and to do ministry safely, not only for the kids, but to protect them as well while they're serving, we feel it's very important that everyone be trained in sexual abuse awareness training, and so in. The first module of train, we talk about why the training is important, what to look for in a good training, how you need to keep documentation of that training, and some things that should be included in the training, such as grooming patterns and signs and symptoms and how to recognize and so we give a charter providers in there that will say, here are a bunch of really great organizations and companies that can give you, give you access to this sexual abuse awareness training. And so that's kind of the first the first module is trained. So the very first step is, after you finish the video, is to find a provider to give you sexual abuse awareness training. And then once they kind of get that under wraps, and they get that link, or they send that out to all of their people. They move on to the next one, which is screen, which I can I'll pass that over to Brad to talk about screening.

Laurie Acker: 21:21

You know, let me interrupt you. Let me interrupt you, just for a minute, because, as you are talking right now, there's so much value in bringing a group of people together, like you talked about your 555, in starting this conversation because I've seen some ministry places or, you know, just going into workplace. Here's the policy, you know, do it and follow it, you know. And people really are not part of that process. And if you're listening right now and you're like, oh my gosh, I don't want to talk about this. This is heavy, this is hard, this is difficult, yes, and this is life, but the more we talk about it, I think it was Mr. Rogers who said, If it's mentionable, it's manageable. And I think Brad, when you talked earlier about the the lack of reporting, that 80 plus percent of survivors never report, even like, if we can make this more mentionable, just on a on a human level of let's talk about this. Let's, let's normalize this, not normalizing abuse, but normalize the conversation. Because it does happen. And the fact that 25% which is probably a low number of of people, humans, have had, you know, have have been victims of sexual abuse, this is not the this is not this tiny little portion of our population. This, this is a big part of our churches. It's part of our culture, it's part of our society, and let's turn the tide on it like Let's prevent it. Let's let's watch numbers drop because churches are doing their part, right?

Brad Eubank: 22:51

That's exactly right. And you know, that was, that was the game changer for me. Back in 2013 the very first time I went through training ministry, safe training is what it was. And I'd never heard, all I'd ever heard was in seminary was, here's how you help people who've been through abuse or recognize the signs. I'd never heard somebody say you can actually recognize, sometimes, many times, the signs of grooming behavior of those who are trying to gain access to the gatekeeper and to kids. And you can recognize that. And so you can that's how the tide has turned. I mean, it's how you recognize before it ever happens. And you raise the bar high in your church, so that the fence that goes around your church is high. People know and recognize and know to say, this is not good, which is the second piece, which is screen, by the way, which is really a very quickly, a five step process. We want to encourage people to do when they get volunteers to help. What do you do? We call it the airport strategy. You go through the airport, you have to hold your hands up, and it scans this thing around you, to scan your body, 360 degrees. We want to encourage people, really, to do five things. One, encouragement to do an application, a background check. Now, background checks are important. We don't want to maximize them or minimize them. They're important, but they only find seven to 10% will ever show up on a background check of a sex offender, because many of them never prosecuted, never get caught, or they plead down to other offenses. And so you need to run them. But they are not the only tool that you need. They're just one of the five we believe you need to do so an application, a background check, references that you actually call and you actually talk to so you know that they're there. And then you do an interview, a personal interview, with that person, right? And you make sure you know that it's the last step, by the way, the one right before that is to do a social media or Google check, put their name in and see what comes out, check their social media. If they've got questionable things, red flags that are either on their application or on the social media, then you've got conversations when you come to an interview, one on one. Now let me ask this, because you're going to hear this in your in your small churches many times. Well, what about Aunt Sally or grandma? Who's our pastor? 35 years are you telling me or pastor? Are you telling me we have to make them do a background check, and they have to do these policy procedures. And here's what I would say. This is what I always say to a grandparent, one on one to let's just say it's grandma. How much do you love these children you take care of so much. How much do you love your grandchildren, your children, so much? What would you do? What level would you go to to make sure they're safe. I'd go to any level. Then what I need you to do to help me get these things in place is to agree to be a part on the ground floor of helping us launch this thing. And say, I'll be first. The pastor says, I'll be first. I'll go through the background check, I'll do the whole process. And when that happens, all of a sudden they're like, Oh, well, if they'll do it, then I certainly. Need to do it because they're the most trusted people in our church. So that's a great way to start the screen process, which takes us to protect well,

Kris Buckman: 25:37

I'll just tag onto your screen too. A lot of times, the reaction you'll get to is, well, don't you trust us? Or, why are you looking me up one side and down the other? You know me. But it's not really that we don't trust the people that we have in our churches. We also want the community to trust us with their children. And ask any parent that's out there nowadays, they want to know these things when they come and drop their kids off with you, and so you're building trust with the community. Likewise. And that screen step, there's a lot of documents that are involved in that screening process, and the great thing about this resources, all the documents are included in there. So we've included a sample application, a sample policies and procedures, questions to ask your references, a reference form, background check, approval form, what questions and things to look for when you're doing a Google search on somebody. So we've included all of that takes all the guesswork out of that. And we have the documents there, whether you download them and tailor them to your ministry, or you put the book on a copy machine if you have a copy of the book. So we've included all that for you in the screening process. So that's kind of takes a hopefully takes a weight off some of those people serving in the smaller churches that think, oh my gosh, I've got to find an application. I've got to find this. I don't know what to ask here, interview questions. We've included questions to ask in an interview. So we've got all that on there for the screening process. And then the third thing is policies and procedures. What does that look like? You know, how long do they have to be what should be included in them? We the 15 minute training video on that gives you some tips for what to include, how to get people to abide by your policies and procedures. So it's a robust again, like we said, we've give you a sample application or sample policies and procedures that you can tailor for your church, which is big. A lot of churches we go into say, Well, this is, let me see if I can find the policies and procedures. And that's one red flag where I know, okay, they're probably not following them. So if that's if what you have in your policies and procedures isn't really what you do, then change them and make them say what you actually do, if that's a safe procedure. So making sure that you take those policies and procedures and look at them every year, because some churches will have policies and they're like a band policy, and they don't even have a church band, we'll take that out. Or if you add a ministry throughout the year, maybe you're going to add a youth mentoring ministry. Well, you're going to need some policies surrounding that to keep both the mentor and the mentee safe during that ministry process. So you may have to add some policies there. And so just thinking through some of those things in that, in that module, that 15 minutes, and then again, giving them a sample that they can work from and move forward from

Laurie Acker: 28:26

now. I know there's people who are listening right now who are like moaning and groaning and going, there is no way you don't understand me. We are barely keeping our nursery open. I'm doing 18 jobs at once. There is no way I'm going to do this. And I just want to say, after a few decades in children and youth ministry, please stop doing youth ministry and children's ministry until you have this in place, your church will survive if you can only do one thing, or if you need to cancel Sunday school for a month to work through this during that Sunday school time, like please do that. This is worth it. And the other thing is, is once this groundwork is laid and there is a routine, it really is not that difficult to keep maintaining. And if I were like in charge of a smaller church today, I honestly would try to get every single person in my smaller church through this training. I'd even want to get them all background checked and cleared, so that when we are short, we can say, hey, Susie, can you come watch the nursery? And I already know she's approved. I already know she's trusted, I already know she's screened, and so quite honestly, I think smaller churches is a great place to do this. I honestly think we can have a safer environment if we prioritize it. And it's not only about keeping the kids safe, it's about protecting your volunteers, it's about protecting your church. It's about protecting the reputation of your church and becoming the safest, most trustworthy place in your community. Like, isn't that awesome? Like, that's why this exists. Okay, I think I interrupted your flow. What's Next

Kris Buckman: 30:03

again? To that real quick before we move on to report. Like, so many times I see kids ministry leaders pouring everything into their curriculum and their theme for VBS and their events and their trunk or treat. But if one child is abused in your church, chances are it's generational. They will never step foot in church again, and so all of that goes out the window. Everything that you've done goes out the window. Know, and if it gets blown up into the media. I mean, I hate to say that it's your church's reputation, but yes, you can forget about that, but we need to flip it on its head and think about that one child like that goes back to that verse Brad said in the very beginning, like, I don't want to be responsible for standing the way of that child's faith. And if there are things I could have done to make my ministry safer from the get go when I stand before Christ at the end of times, hopefully that I can say I did everything that I could to protect your children, to make it safe for them to come to you and hear the gospel. So just wanted to thread that in there, but we'll move it on to we've done train screen, protect them onto report, yep, and

Brad Eubank: 31:12

I'll just kind of combine these two, because we've talked about a little bit. I know our time's running out here, but just report gives you how to report internally and externally. How do you report internally to your church? What does that look like? And then what is required you need to look. They need to look. What's required in your state by your state laws. Who do you contact? Have all that information ready? Because here's what I hear when a pastor calls me over the last two years, Brad, I am I am so freaking out. I have no idea what to do. Nobody's trained me for this. I have no idea what to do, and all of a sudden it becomes pure panic response mode. I had a pastor call me last year on the night before Thanksgiving. Wednesday night, found out a six year old janitor had molested a teenager in his church, and he's like, What do I do? It's like seven o'clock and I was about to sit down. Was about to sit down to dinner with my family, and so I spent an hour and 45 minutes with him on the phone, trying to help him understand the process and walk him through all this. And he said, Well, by the way, I've got this book we just got from our state convention, but I put it in my drawer, and here's the statement, I hope I'd never use it or need it. And I said, friend, that's why we sent it to you. I said, but here's the great news, if you'll open that book now, it's got a section on how you can respond and steps that you need to take, 123, and how do you walk through that? Because you'd rather spend a little bit of time on the front side preparing so that you don't have the worst news a pastor in a church can encounter is a child has been molested inside of our church building or inside one by one of our volunteers or staff people, and so you'd rather spend on the backside. So the report gives you the really clear steps. I'm talking literally have arrows that draw the line this you do 12345, this is what you need to do to do that. And again, it's a lawyer that does that. She's a great gal. And then we have the care section. How do you care for folks who have experienced in your church? What are some resources you can put in place in your church to offer. One of those is a fearless resource that's put by a pastor by the name of Dr James Reeves, that you can start groups in your church that can walk through for men and for women, separately of how you can walk through that. It's a great it's one of the only ones I've seen out there that can happen inside of a church. You certainly want to be a part of counseling, yes, but here's a way that churches can actually offer a resource on a very simple scale. But again, it's not a difficult thing. It's all video based. You turn on the TV, you got some discussion questions, and away you go. So we just really believe they'll do the 555, of these five steps. It's really doable and can easily be done inside of their local church. You

Laurie Acker: 33:29

know, for when I've worked with churches before on these issues. A lot of times, the question is, what's the minimum I need to do? And I hate that question. I have to say, I don't want to be the minimum. I want to do more. Yeah, but I love that this particular resource you all are offering that is free again, and we're going to talk about that again. We're going to give the link again. It's in the show notes, because we really want as many churches to access this as possible. But this free resource is called essentials, like, I just love that it's called Essentials because this is the minimum. It's not overkill. You all like when you actually get a hold of this booklet, and by the way, it's one of the most complete ones and trainings that is free that I've seen anywhere. So well done, put together so well. And I'd love for you guys to give a shout out on how this is even free, because I know it took a lot of time and money and effort to put this together to have it available online. So we'd love to acknowledge that organization or the partners in that as well. But this, again, it's called Essentials. This, this is what you need. Like, it's all here, and it's all important. And no, if you're going to do responsible children youth ministry, you can't skip any of these. Nope,

Brad Eubank: 34:41

each one's important every single step. And that's why it's a circle in the when they get the information, they'll see it's in a circle because it is a flow. We want you to go step one and work your way through. And it's continuous, because you continually do these things, you have to reinvent the wheel. But we're continually doing this process over and over and over again with new volunteers, with new staff members, with new people that come in. And so it's a continual thing to keep your church safe and the safest place on planet Earth.

Laurie Acker: 35:07

Yeah, and Brad and Chris, I know you. You both were instrumental in putting this together and working on this project together as well. But how is this free for everyone, like, what are the partner people? Or anything like that?

Brad Eubank: 35:20

Well, I will tell you in the Southern Baptist Convention, we sometimes have not done very well in handling this topic in recent decades. However, our convention made a strong. Commitment back in 2021 and then into 2022 and Anaheim, where we said we we are committed to making an impact. Have we done all we want to do or need to do? The answer is absolutely not. We believe we've begun to move the needle in our convention. And so our convention set aside some serious funds to help that through a group called Send relief that helped give some resources. And so it was a it's not a cheap endeavor, it's it was expensive, but it's worth every dime if we protect children. And so they help produce the resource, host the website. All those things were launched through our Southern Baptist Convention. And so it's one of the good things that we've done. There's more we hope to be done inside of our convention that would be accessible for other churches and denominations that are outside the Southern Baptist Convention, just like this resource is not just targeted directly at Southern Baptist and so there's a booklet there, there's also a brochure that's available there, and it's all free, and it's a step by step process that they walk through.

Laurie Acker: 36:30

Well, I know this is a super heavy topic, and it needs to be, because it is heavy. But Brad, do you or Chris, do you have any sweet stories of redemption or restoration, or how these resources have helped, or how you saw a church respond in a way that that you'd be that you'd like to share?

Brad Eubank: 36:51

Yeah, we have seen some good ones. I got, I had a chance to tell Chris As I got a phone call from a guy who'd been up in South Dakota, and the churches up there were just received essentials and were starting to put it into place, and we're super excited about that. And said, Hey, and they're smaller churches obviously in South Dakota, they're not big churches in South Dakota. And so how excited they were to implement those, and how easy they thought it was going to be to implement those things. And, you know, sometimes we don't know about the prevention stories, because thank God, the stories never happen, but we do certainly find that we talk to survivors who watch a church do it well and respond well and and I've talked with one of those in recent weeks and months where her church took it seriously, even though it happened decades ago, but handled it the right way, and at really, at a cost to them on some levels, when many wanted to squelch it, and just say, so long ago, it doesn't matter, but handled it in a beautiful, wonderful way. And as a result, other victims came out, not of that same perpetrator, but other people. And so the reality is, if we can bring this subject from the darkness into the light of talking about this subject and making it normative in the sense we can talk about it, and it's not a scary thing. I've written to pastors who have my same story or similar story, and they've never told their story their congregation, every church I've ever been a part of, I always tell my story because I want them to know that I'm not the only one who has brokenness in my life. I know you have it and I have it, and I can relate to you, and we can talk together about this, and we can address this together and find help, hope and healing that comes in Christ, Jesus. That's the place the church ought to be. It should never happen. But if it has happened, whether inside the church or outside the church, it's the very place they ought to want to come to say, this is where I can find help, hope and healing, because it comes in through the Bride of Christ, that represents Christ, Jesus, and so that's our hope and prayer that we see prevention, but also we respond when it does happen, and we care for those who have experienced it. One other story we had that was really very meaningful. There was a church in our convention that had experienced multiple cases of perpetrators doing abuse inside of their church, and they had hired a lady, it's a large church in our convention, hired a young lady to come in and help them implement policies and procedures help them make their response those kinds of things. And I began talking to her somewhere in January of this past year, and they this church was already in the news for really making a mess of how they responded. And I told her we had this thing coming, this curriculum. And so I got to meet her in June at our southern office convention. She came to our booth, she got her material, she went back to her hotel room, she read the material, watched all the videos, and she came back the next day, and I'll never forget it. She was weeping, and she said, Oh, if I only had had this six months ago, that our response would have been so much different. We wouldn't have hurt survivors. We would our church would not have been as hurt. And if I'd have just had this earlier, and even, of course, earlier in the life cycle of church, because they didn't have the policies and procedures that they needed. They weren't responding well, they weren't protecting well, just the thought of the the hurt that could have been prevented if you just had taken and had these steps ahead of time. And so couldn't help her in that regard. But the reality of testimony for her is, if you do this, and these things do happen, my goodness, here is a great resource to help you and your church respond. Well, yeah,

Laurie Acker: 40:18

you know, sometimes I think about things that I wish I'd done differently in the past, and I always love it the thought that, you know, we can't repeat the past. We can't go backwards, but, but we can rebuild, and we can restore a. And all is not lost, because we do have a redemptive God, and so I love that so much. And thank you for sharing that story, Chris. Any last words before we close up for today?

Kris Buckman: 40:45

I think, I think Brad, Brad, have that give. The last thing I was going to say was usually when I go out to a church and I do trainings. The last thing I say to them is that the church should be the last place that someone should experience abuse, but it should be the first place they come to if they have experienced abuse outside the church. And we need to be trained as a people to know what to do with that. Just one more stat to throw out. There is the number one reason kids don't tell anybody about their abuse is they don't think anyone's going to believe them. And so a lot of times, their disclosures don't come out as a disclosure. They test the waters first. And so we as adults need to be trained to hear that and to know this child might be trying to tell me something that's happening to them outside of the church, so that we can help them and we can be the same place. So that's important for our people to get trained and to know how to how to handle that thing, that those things, yeah,

Laurie Acker: 41:37

and to me, just the last sad truth I'd like to throw out here and get some response specifically from Brad on this one is, sadly, a lot of churches, especially smaller churches, are very resistant, because this feels overwhelming. It feels like a lot. It feels like we don't need it, and we have a lot of people listening right now who are Sunday school teachers, volunteers in women's ministry, you know, a mom, a dad, and maybe they are not in positions of authority like the pastor or the council. So what advice would you give to our amazing volunteers who are listening right now, who are not in charge of making the decision or pushing this through. How can we influence a change in our church culture that acknowledges, not just acknowledges, but are willing to, you know, walk into this with their eyes open, looking at Prevention and Response?

Brad Eubank: 42:31

Yeah. I mean, obviously the pastor, many times in any size church, is going to be the linchpin. He's going to be the person that helps influencer. The pastor is for it. It's going to be it's going to happen. And so I would, I would do two things. One, I would go to the pastor, and I would try to explain to him and present this material to him, and tell him, You don't have to do anything. That's what a pastor wants to hear. Not I got a great ministry idea, and you need to do it. Here's a great ministry idea, and I'll help lead the effort. I'll help organize this. I'll help speak to whoever and help get it started. And if you could speak your blessing over it, if you could give your encouragement from the pulpit, or whatever the case may be, then you can help lend your support and vision for it. Because a pastor doesn't need especially a small church, especially he's by vocational he doesn't want anything else on this plate, obviously, because he's got so much, I know, and so I think if you take it off his plate and say, I'll handle it, I think that's going to help a lot. Or the other way is, is I get some key volunteers, some really key volunteers in these areas, and I would schedule a meeting with the pastor, maybe with the deacons, if you don't have a pastor at the time, whatever it may be. And I would just present some of these statistics to say, we don't want to be one of these statistics. We want to be on the forefront. We want to get this right. We want to do what's, what's the gospel proclaims and challenges to do, speak up for those who can't speak for themselves. And so let's make this happen, and we'll be a part of the solution. Not just expect you to go do it, but here, well, I'm gonna come with the solution. Here's the material, here's how we can do it, and then I think you have a much better shot. I love

Laurie Acker: 43:58

that. And you know, keeping in mind, everyone who's listening, this is not just for the people in your church, as Chris mentioned earlier, this is, this is the trust and confidence of visitors, of people who walk into your community from the outside. Yes, you may know everybody in your church. You know they don't, they don't, and so give this podcast a little bit of mileage y'all and share it with somebody else in your church. You can share it with your pastor, you can share it with your council members, you can share it with Sunday school teachers, with parents, and the more we can make this conversation. As Brad said earlier, just bring it to light, the more we're going to see some changes for the future. So thank you, Pastor, Brad, for being with us and for Chris, just so glad that you were able to take the time. We will drop the link in the show notes so everybody can access the free, completely free training essentials for sexual abuse prevention and response in our churches, so let's just do better. All right, until next week. Be Light you.