Help Prevent Harmful Acts With Responsible Staffing

Abuse of children, youth, and vulnerable adults is an unfortunate reality in society and has occurred even in Unitarian Universalist congregations.

The Unitarian Universalist Association has a new Web-based resource to help congregational leaders meet their responsibility to do all they can to prevent such abuse. Guidelines on Responsible Staffing was completed recently by the Rev. John Weston, the UUA’s settlement director, and the Rev. Harlan Limpert, director for district services, with help from many others.

The guidelines are designed to protect congregations not only from sexual abuse but also from financial misconduct by church staff and volun- teers. The guidelines include recommendations that congregations implement uniform screening procedures when filling leadership positions.

Weston and Limpert encourage all congregations to adopt the guidelines for ethical and religious reasons in addition to protecting themselves from legal liability in a world in which organizations, and their leaders, are being held increasingly responsible for actions by employees and volunteers.

Congregations in several denominations have already been sued for not preventing misconduct, says Weston, and individual staff members will likely be next. “I suspect that it will not be long before a minister who is designated ‘chief of staff’ in a congregation will be successfully sued on the grounds of negligent supervision and/or negligent hiring, just as congregations have been,” said Weston. “It is in everyone’s interest to exercise care in calling ministers, hiring church staff, and recruiting volunteers.”

The responsible staffing guidelines are to be used when calling ministers, hiring other professional leaders and church staff, and recruiting key volunteers. Weston emphasized that as part of congregational polity, congregations, not the UUA, have primary responsibility for screening ministers and other staff.

The guidelines come in the wake of two recent Massachusetts cases that hold officers of organizations responsible for actions of employees and volunteers. In one, the board of trustees of a private school was indicted for failing to report student-on-student sexual harassment. In another, a state judge ruled that a church can be sued for failing to prevent the sexual abuse of a girl by a minister.

The guidelines and background information are available on the UUA’s Web site: www.uua.org/programs/ministry/responsiblestaffing.html. Included are questions and forms that congregations can use in interviewing candidates and conducting reference and background checks. Reference checks are phone calls or letters to former employers or co-workers who can speak to an applicant’s character, skills, and abilities. Background checks search criminal records.

The guidelines are recommended not only to boards of trustees, but also to ministerial search committees, religious educator search committees, personnel committees, nominating committees, youth and young adult bodies, and any other group charged with recommending or hiring staff or recruiting volunteers.

It was the Roman Catholic Church sex scandals that drove Jennifer O’Grady to want to protect her own congregation, Second Unitarian Church in Chicago. “We’d never had an incident, and I wanted to keep it that way,” says Grady, the director of religious education for eight years.

At her request the board of trustees adopted a safe congregations policy five years ago that requires background checks and criminal investigations by an outside firm on everyone who joins the staff. “It gives us a good feeling, knowing we are being responsible and safeguarding the people in our community,” she says.