FROM SCANDAL TO SAFE – REFLECTIONS ON CREATING A TRULY SAFE CHURCH

From being sacked for highlighting a faulty component in the production of domestic ovens, through developing a simple yet effective process to identify potential problems in drive-by-wire systems, to running my own troubleshooting business, for over 50 years I have been deeply involved in seeking ways to eliminate risk.  For the past 27 years of those 50, I’ve also been an NSM priest, serving mainly as vicar of single-village parishes, observing the growing development of Safeguarding practice in the Church of England. 

Most of my Engineering career was spent in the automotive industry.  In 1978 we were designing parts to last 60,000 miles – any less than that could lead to a bad reputation, anymore would result in lower profits.  We killed on average one employee per year per factory and injured countless others.  Within the factory, a 3% defect rate at each process step was regarded as acceptable and 1% as Best Practice, so a car with 10,000 components could be delivered with at least 100 sub-standard parts. By the time I sort of retired (I’m still fading away), a single defect from a factory making 7 million parts a year, or a single near‑miss potential injury, would be reported to the board; two defects in a year or any reportable injury would have an army of specialists descending from on high to sort it out.  So, what was our journey?

The start point was external pressure.  Japanese and German cars started arriving in the UK.   They didn’t have defects, didn’t spend half their time being repaired, and taxi operators discovered that they could run 24/7 for years without failing. 

The second external pressure was the rise of no-win, no-fee class action lawsuits, originating in the USA in 1966 and then coming to the UK in 1995. 

Thus, both reputational and economic forces started to drive a change in understanding of the seriousness of our historic and current failures. 

Does this sound familiar?  I can remember around 1990, a year after I joined the CofE, meeting someone involved with a group for Survivors of Clerical Abuse.  I simply didn’t understand what the person was talking about.  It took cases involving ministers I knew well to shake me out of my denial.

In industry, these pressures led to a focus on policies and procedures, attempting to apply the pilots’ checklist approach to car factories and, eventually, every business.  Remember “We are an ISO 9000 Company” plastered on trucks, adverts and business entrances?  Our procedures were long, detailed and frankly unworkable- we had a large room stacked floor to ceiling with them.  At the same time, we employed armies of people to train and police these things.  We pulled our local defect rate down from 3% to 1% and sat back, satisfied that we were doing all we could. 

But it wasn’t enough.  We had government and industry inquiries and conferences decrying the failure of British Industry.   The business consultants came up with expensive programmes - rewritten and renamed every few years  to keep the gravy train going.  The underlying philosophy of all this was to make the workers responsible for both making good parts and staying safe.  They had training courses and special “Officers” to help them.  This was not unsuccessful, as we saw both defect and injury rates decline, the former to around 0.3%. 

I’d argue that the CofE’s Safeguarding journey is at this stage – the policies and procedures are in place and a better culture is slowly taking root.  So, what’s missing, and how do we get to Safe without needing an army of Guards?

In the early 2000s, we were building a lot of new factories in Eastern Europe.  In many, we had unexpected crises in every possible area – employee relations, quality, delivery, etc., etc.  Whilst each could be fixed. we came to realise that there was a common factor:  We were using Western managers to train up teams in the new factories, and in every case of business problems we found that those managers were having relationship problems due to an affair with an employee.  We switched the focus of our team from solving the commercial problems to pastoral care of the leadership.  The results were dramatic.  Previously, we were losing managers after a year on average; that dropped to zero.  Productivity, quality, safety all improved rapidly with minimal effort on our part.  

That ‘pastoral care’ could be quite intrusive.  I remember my own boss commenting to me, “You seem to be doing a lot of trips with Frau Fischer recently – just the two of you.”  And then he stared at me.  Frau Fischer was a brilliant engineer, young and attractive.  Nothing had happened, but what if he hadn’t pointed this out?  I related this story to an archdeacon, after pointing out to him that, in all my years of working overseas whilst also being vicar of a village church, and in the years since my wife died and I was ministering as a widower in a context with significant contact with potentially vulnerable women, not one senior cleric had enquired about my sex life and the temptations I was exposed to.  “I would NEVER discuss anything like that with one of my clergy!”  “And that’s why you have Safeguarding problems!”

When my collaborator in Faithful Responsibility was doing his Post-Ordination Training, he was tasked with producing a thesis looking at “How missional is the diocesan office?”  I offered to assist with the statistical side, and we ended up studying not only his then diocese but also the 5 top and 5 bottom dioceses ranked by change in ‘bums-on-seats’.  We could find no correlation between the outcomes and the various programmes being run so were at a bit of a loss, until I thought about the above experience.  We then obtained the engagement diaries of the bishops and archdeacons for those dioceses and we had our correlation – those with growing or less-declining numbers were those in which the leadership spent most of their time in the parishes and vice-versa.  We also realised that we had another correlation – the best performing dioceses welcomed us with open arms and offered every assistance, and vice versa.

My conclusion?  That true Safe comes from proper pastoral care, (by bishops and archdeacons not ‘well-being’ staff), of the clergy and then by them of their volunteers.  And from a culture of wanting to know about problems and then dealing with them. That requires a radical change in behaviour rather than in procedures but it will not only reduce Safeguarding issues but also improve every aspect of church ‘performance’.