Risk assessments, sin and the trap of Pharisaism

I recently completed an admin task that I had never done before.

It was perhaps something that I should have done before, but no one had asked, and I hadn’t considered it necessary. I had managed to avoid it for 30 years. That is approximately the number of years my husband and I have led one Bible study group or another in our home. What was the task? A risk assessment for leading a church group in our home. Why, after all these years, are we now doing one? Because it was recommended as good practice at recent safeguarding training. Some of you reading this may be horrified by our previous lack of diligence, especially as we had four children at home during much of that time. Others of you may now be thinking that perhaps this is something you need to add to your to-do list.

Our culture has changed dramatically in the last few years. Anyone involved in church leadership will have spent much time considering and reconsidering safeguarding. Things that were done casually in the past are no longer straightforward. If you were involved in youth work on a summer camp, you will know that linking with young people on social media is taboo, as is writing a private sealed letter to a teenager to encourage them in their faith – you can write a postcard. Adding to the mix, pastors struggle to work out how to supervise female team members, and some make rules that mean men and women cannot car share. We are all aware of terrible pastoral failures and desperate to avoid abusive situations and relationships. We long to be diligent and careful.

When we started the Northern Women’s Convention in 2004, none of us considered health and safety risk assessments. We hired Manchester University and assumed they covered those sorts of things. We had about 1,000 women gathered, and some interesting times, particularly the year the toilets flooded and water poured through a seminar room ceiling. Now, our committee plans, considers, communicates and records risk assessments in three separate venues, which, as you can imagine, involves much more work. It also creates more anxiety as people imagine a list of what-ifs.

It is right for us to be wise about situations. Still, there is an unintended consequence to all this diligence – people are reluctant to volunteer and afraid of being held responsible if things go wrong. Ask anyone involved in a charity, and they will tell you that finding people willing to be trustees is increasingly difficult. The bureaucracy that surrounds charity law is daunting, to say the least. Ironically, in our drive to make our churches and events safer, we have made those who lead these things feel more insecure. The reason for this is not that our risk assessments are wasted, but we know that however thorough our procedures are, however careful, we cannot protect everyone all the time from harm.

The truth is that, whatever rules or guidelines we put in place, we can be blindsided by someone who does something unimaginable. I have been around in ministry settings long enough to see people who I thought were strong fail in ways I could not have conceived. I recently spoke to a church leader who told me about a young man who had worked at his church; this young man married a godly woman, and they went to train at Bible college. They went to serve in a church, and he had a popular and fruitful ministry. However, a few years later, it was discovered that he was having an affair. It was an affair of many years that had begun before he was married and continued throughout his time at college. Everyone was devastated. He had been through a selection process to check his life and doctrine but was lying the whole time. All the church processes had not revealed any problems. His young wife was thoroughly deceived and left devastated.

The law has never stopped sin – it reveals it. We must address it when it is revealed, but we cannot offer guarantees against it. This matters because, if we think we can, we will fall into the trap that the Pharisees fell into – create a legalistic system to try and avoid sin and then unwittingly have rules which mean we no longer spontaneously care for others, open up our homes, give hospitality, offer that lift home, share the gospel and encourage another believer. And, when things go wrong, we need to be careful before we blame others for failing to protect against it, because however hard we try in this world, we cannot make things perfect.