Confronted with pastoral abuse allegations? Discover biblically grounded, trauma-informed steps for church leaders to prioritize truth, safety, and healing.

Vacation Bible School is often the most high-energy, chaotic, and beautiful week in the life of a children's ministry. But in the thick of planning decorations, games, and snacks, ensuring the safety and protection of the children in your care must be the baseline of your preparation. Offenders look for environments where privacy is easily accessed and chaos masks boundary violations. Here are the top 7 things you need to prepare right now to make your VBS a sanctuary of safety and healing.

When an allegation of abuse surfaces, church leaders often face immediate confusion. Should you wait for the police to finish before taking action? Does filing a report satisfy your duty to the church body? If civil authorities close a case without filing charges, does that mean the church’s work is done?

During an independent church abuse investigation, investigators establish the scope, collect records, conduct voluntary interviews, evaluate the evidence, examine the institution’s response, and prepare findings and recommendations.

When an allegation of abuse comes to light, leaders naturally focus on the Alleged Offender, gathering facts, weighing conflicting accounts, examining evidence, and ensuring a fair process. That focus is essential for immediate safety and administrative decisions, but stopping there leaves some of the most critical institutional questions unanswered.

A credible church abuse investigation is structurally independent, aligned with truth, trauma-informed, and grounded in objective evidence evaluation. Investigators must be free to follow relevant evidence, examine institutional causes, coordinate responsibly with civil authorities, and report their findings without institutional control.

Report distribution is a foundational structural element of an investigation. Decisions about who receives the report must be established in writing before anyone knows what the investigation will uncover.

Unstructured time (such as travel, overnight trips, informal hangouts, lock-ins, etc.) create an increased risk for children and teens because they involve sleeping arrangements, showering and changing, or other vulnerable situations. In this article we will look at basic safety recommendations for student trips.

When people ask, “How did this happen?” they’re often searching for a single point of failure. Was it a destructive leader? A non-existent or weak policy? A failure of bystanders to speak up? The best way to approach answering this question is to think in systems, understanding how a set of parts might work together in an interconnected network.

Boz Tchividjian explains three narratives that are most common among offending leaders.

A survivor of horrific child abuse and abduction while living in a Christian home, David Linwah shares what he has wanted the Church to hear for so long.

A disturbingly common legal maneuver is utilized by attorneys across the United States which ends up discouraging victims from coming forward, David Clohessy explains.

In this interview with memoirist Trudy Metzger, the truth is revealed about how the deep physical, emotional, and spiritual pains caused by childhood trauma cannot obscure a loving God who crosses the road and gets down into the dirt with the hurting and brutalized.

In the past 20 years, I have come across many situations where folks  have found themselves conflicted about whether to say something after observing unsettling behavior between an adult and a child.  Unfortunately, too many have decided it’s best to remain silent. 

Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis explains how the Black church can directly confront child abuse, beginning within its own community.

Boz Tchividjian reflects on the similarities survivors of abuse have with Jesus and His sufferings.

A silent church will always protect perpetrators over God’s little ones.  A silent church will always abandon the very ones God holds precious.  In fact, a silent church is no church at all. God was certainly not silent in the face of evil, neither should we.