Sex Offender Policies: Write Them, Don't Hide Them; Follow Them

Be equipped to help your church avoid these mistakes.

It amazes me that any church would not treat this issue - as soon as it first arises - as a potentially existential threat, and make sure it was resolved as soon as possible. Instead, what we saw in our former church, Edgefield Church Nashville, was a progression through a series of, in my opinion, dangerous situations, over a long period of time, despite our patient, thoughtful and persistent feedback to the elders.

Every church should have solved this issue prior to encountering a sex offender. Failure to already have a clear, transparent and safe policy in place opens the door for the offender to affect it through emotional and spiritual manipulation.

I’ll detail the progressions below, with a focus on an overview of who knows about the policy, whether it’s applied and whether or not there is a policy at all.

Does your church have a policy for this? Have you read it? If the answer to either of those questions is no, please email your elders now and ask them to write a policy and send you a copy. It doesn’t have to be a stand-alone policy - many churches might include relevant clauses in more general protection or safeguarding policy, and that’s fine. Get them all, read them all!

The usual caveat: I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. I’m just a Christian with a desire to keep our churches safe and I’m prepared to question elders and their actions to make sure that’s the case. You should too! When we get the right answers, that builds the healthy relationship of trust between us and our churches.

1. Minister to offenders in secret without any policy or protections

Congregants should never accept this.

Engaging in this ministry secretly, completely breaks the facade that elders might be held responsible by their members. How are members to hold elders accountable for that which they aren’t even aware of?

A sex offender in a congregation, not disclosed, and with no protections, is highly dangerous for the church. If anything were to go wrong, the church is potentially looking at a law suit from a victim in which their insurance may refuse to cover them.

Churches have shown time and time again that in this situation - instead of taking the legal or financial costs consequent to their mishandling - elders will instead hand off that cost to victims. This might look like refusing to do an investigation into whether abuse took place, or it might look like refusing to believe victims, or worse still, actively trying to cover up known crimes, moving offenders on to other churches with no accountability.

We’d all like to believe this doesn’t happen, and would never happen in our own church. But there are too many stories of this happening to allow ourselves to succumb to that comfortable deception.

It appears, as best we can tell, that this situation was the case at Edgefield Baptist Church until January 2021. Only the pastors knew about the offender, and he was able to engage in seemingly every part of church life: being employed by the church, being involved in children’s plays and more.

These are not healthy churches. We should not tolerate this as congregants.

2. Have a secret, “verbal” policy

A policy serves two purposes:

• It records in a clear and definitive manner what rules are in place

• It gives others who have knowledge of the policy a way to hold others to account, who have breached its rules

Our church claimed that for a time, from January 2021 onwards, they ministered to a convicted child rapist under a verbal agreement, that they also would refer to as their “policy”.

A policy needs to be a written document. If it is verbal, each time it is relayed or referred to, it is malleable and can be subtly altered in a significant manner. Disagreements as to what the policy says can easily arise. This is the entire foundation of contract law. The more serious an engagement is, the more egregious the lack of a written document: just as you, the reader, would probably pay a neighborhood teenager $20 for mowing your lawn under a verbal agreement, you would probably also not enter into a permanent employment without a written contract. Likewise, a church probably doesn’t need a written policy on parking, but it does - obviously - for ministering to sex offenders.

Of course, if no-one knows about the agreement other than the offender and the elders, this is also problematic. The central subjects of these policies should not be neither the elders or the offender, but the congregation and general public who attend, whose safety should be the central concern. A policy is largely useless if all the people who it potentially affects do not have a copy of it. Imagine a country where only law makers and criminals had access to a copy of the laws - this is useless.

One issue our church wrestled with for some time was whether or not to disclose the offender to the congregation. Eventually, after some time, they did. But, for the time they failed to, they also neglected to release to members a policy saying that they did not disclose to sex offenders.

If a church doesn’t disclose, the congregation needs to know they don’t disclose, since that means they are accepting there might be known sex offenders around their children who they are unaware of, which is something many - if not most - parents and victims would not be willing to do.

To be clear: not disclosing is wrong, because a parent’s right to decide whether their children are exposed to a sex offender should always trump an offender’s wish to attend without everyone knowing about their past (and I’d argue this wish itself is a red flag). However, a church not telling people they don’t disclose is even worse.

It’s sad that as congregants we have to enter churches in 2024 and ask questions like, “do you disclose sex offenders?”, or, “do you have a sex offender’s policy, and if so, may I have a copy?” I wish that the leadership of our churches were universally wise enough that we could safely assume the answer to those questions.

They keep on showing us that we can’t.

3. Write a policy, but don’t follow it

It’s one thing for a policy to set a rule, it’s another to ensure it can be enforced. Elders who write policies laying out how they themselves are bound to behave in certain situations, and then decline to behave in accordance with their own policy, are in sin. This is, simply, a deceit - be it the result of negligence or malice is irrelevant. It is, in my opinion, disqualifying of elders since they should be above reproach (Titus 1:6-7).

Once a policy is broken, and there is no accountability for that, the entirety of the policy becomes worthless. Why should any part of it be followed, when one part of it was not, and nothing happened?

In our church, we saw three failures to follow policy. Firstly, the policy talked about disclosure and what that looked like:

All disclosures are done so in writing, typically via email. The written disclosure will include but is not limited to, identifying the offender, the guidelines he or she must follow, and any other information the elders determine is necessary to include.

(Bold and italics in this quote are my own). In this case, the “guidelines he or she must follow” are clearly the code of conduct, a separate document that had to be signed by the offender. Yet, this document was not attached to the disclosure email, and still hadn’t been sent round to members 5 days later, at the next member’s meeting. When, at the meeting, I put this to the elders, they seemed surprised that I was objecting: I think simply, they didn’t realize their own policy compelled them to do this. They did share the code of conduct the next day, but did not take accountability for not following their policy, stating that there was a mix-up or misunderstanding. It is not acceptable that they didn’t know what the policy said, given they themselves had written it (or instructed someone else to).

This isn’t a mix up. It’s a failure.

The second breach related to the code of conduct itself that stated:

I acknowledge that the Edgefield Church elders will report any suspected criminal activity to authorities.

At a later member’s meeting, the elders would say of the offender’s illegal employment in the church up to December 2020:

We were advised in 2021 by several lawyers that we did not have a responsibility to report his previous work, and that {the offender} was required to do that. 

Let’s temporarily set aside the absurdity of “Godly men” not reporting criminality because the offender themselves should have reported it, and focus instead on September 2023, when their “updated” policy came into effect.

This quote from the members’ meeting is proof that the elders knew that the offender’s employment in the church was subject to being reported. The moment the elders’ own policy came into effect, it bound them to immediately report this illegal employment (and the offender’s failure to report it to the registry) to police.

Lastly, the policy spoke of an investigation that should take place when a sex offender attends the church regularly. These investigations should be done by third-parties who know where to look and which questions to ask, and how to interpret the answers; instead, the policy laid out that the elders should do it themselves:

The elders will appoint two men from the elder board who will meet with the offender as soon as possible and will begin an investigation.

If the elders did appoint two men, they never said which two.

When possible, the elders will attempt to verify details of the situation using at least the following sources:

a) Arrest reports
b) Case records
c) Prosecuting attorneys
d) Social workers
e) Probation/parole officers
f) State and/or national criminal background reports

The elders did not check all these sources where possible, as we would later find more crimes of this offender without going beyond these sources.

The lesson from this story is simple: a policy on its own isn’t enough. You need to see evidence that it’s being followed. The same is true of repentance of sex offenders: the words “I’m sorry” are meaningless unless they are continually backed up by repentant behavior which substantiates them.

4. Write a flawed policy and only share it with members

I wrote specifically about the Edgefield Church policy last week, so for more details on what “flawed” might look like, check that out. Flawed policies are of course better than no policy: at least congregants have clarity that they are not on the same page as their church, and therefore have an opportunity to leave prior to coming to harm.

However, it is my belief that all church policies should be public and fully transparent.

Firstly, some congregants, for their own reason, may not wish to join membership at all (I know this is a difficult step for me personally to ever take again, given my experiences) and others may only do so after attending for some time.

Even one-time visitors to a church have a right to know what a church’s safeguarding policies are, so they can decide if it’s a safe space. These should be available on a church’s website.

Secondly, I’d simply argue: why not make them public? What part of the Bible tells us to keep secrets and to hide things? How many passages have you read about truth, transparency and accountability?

The only safe way: public policy, prioritizing safeguarding, that elders follow

This is not something you can afford for your church to get wrong. Even if you’re not a parent or victim yourself, you have a responsibility to others in your congregation, the leaders and offenders themselves, to ensure the church gets this right.

We’ve seen decades of sex abuse scandals in churches so we now just have to conclude that for whatever reason a lot of church leaders need the help of congregants in this matter.

Ask these questions:

• Do you have a public policy for ministering (or not) to sex offenders? Does it prioritize the safeguarding of the vulnerable over the interests of the offender?

• Do you disclose all known sex offenders to the congregation (and do you have any known offenders attending currently)?

• Can you show me when you’ve enacted these policies as they’re written?

Let’s protect our children from known sex offenders in churches. This is the start: we also need adequate safeguarding against unknown offenders. You, the reader, are as good a person to ask these questions in your church as anyone else. Do it with love, kindness and respect, and if you don’t get the answers you need, find somewhere that aligns with God’s commands to protect children.