What Is the UPCI Doing to Prevent Sexual Abuse?

The US Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than half of all women and almost one in three men will be the victim of some form of sexual violence during their lifetime. Those are sobering statistics. Unfortunately, these types of crimes are sometimes perpetrated by church members and leaders. In this episode, Dr. David K. Bernard shares what the United Pentecostal Church International is doing to prevent sexual abuse from happening and ministering to those who have been abused.

For more information and resources related to this topic, visit UPCI.org/SafeChurch.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

The statistics on sexual abuse in the U.S. are horrifying, but the greatest tragedy is when abuse happens in a church setting. What is the UPCI doing to protect the vulnerable from becoming victims of this horrible crime? Dr. David K. Bernard answers this crucial question next. Welcome to Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, a podcast dedicated to helping modern-day believers live out the teachings of the first century church. This podcast is part of the teaching ministry of Dr. David K. Bernard. Dr. Bernard has dedicated his life to studying the Bible and helping believers apply its message to their daily lives. In Apostolic Life in the 21st century, Dr. Bernard answers your questions about what the Bible teaches and how those teachings apply to everyday life. Thank you for joining us for this episode. Today's topic that we want to talk about is very heavy. I'll start by saying that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than half of all women and almost one in three men will be the victim of some sort of sexual violence during their lifetime. Those are very sobering and sad statistics. And the real travesty is that some of these incidents take place in a church setting, or they're perpetrated by church leaders or by church members. And even worse is when the victim is a minor. Unfortunately, these types of crimes have happened at UPCI churches, or they've been committed by ministers and church leaders. So, first of all, I'd like to ask how widespread is this problem, specifically in the church, and what is the UPCI doing to prevent sexual abuse from happening in our churches?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Well, first of all, this is a very important and serious and, as you say, sobering topic. And it's it's a culture-wide problem. It's a society-wide problem. And the church is not immune. I sometimes use the example uh the churches like your home, the temperature outside is going to affect the temperature inside. So we can have temperature control inside, but if it's freezing outside or if it's 100 degrees outside, you will tell the difference inside your house and you'll have to make adjustments accordingly. So unfortunately, the church comes from society, and the attitudes, the values, the practices, um, the knowledge or lack of knowledge in the whole society is going to affect the members of the church. And then the ministers are drawn from the members, it's going to affect the ministers. So, as we've seen the last few years, every segment of society has had appalling disclosures from the entertainment industry to the news industry to big business to politics to various denominations. Uh, there have been horrendous examples of physical abuse. And of course, the statistics you give probably cover a wide range from sexual harassment to uh maybe one inappropriate action to ongoing abuse or grooming. So uh so the problem is huge across society, and whether Democrats, Republicans, conservative, liberal, Catholic, Protestant, you know, no uh atheist or uh or Muslims, nobody is immune from this. Now, that's not a justification for any wrongdoing. We have had to deal with some examples within the church. I will say, I don't mean to say this in any way to trivialize or minimize, but compared to right now, 11,600 credential ministers in the UPCI, the number of failures there are, you would expect just the law of statistics, there would be some failures. But the number of failures specifically in the area of abuse is very small. Uh, but it is significant. I mean, one is too many. Uh, plus, with the attention in society and with the availability of social media to communicate, uh uh cases of 20, 30, 40, even 50 years ago are now coming to the surface. So we're having to deal with several, not as if there's an extraordinary surge right this minute, but you do have an accumulation of things that for one reason or another were never addressed, either because the victims never felt like could or they weren't handled properly. Uh, even those, it's not an extraordinary number, but each case is traumatic. And haven't many states eliminated statutes of limitations on these types of crimes? And also that that is also kind of in the secular society as well as a church, this kind of pin-up thing of cases that you couldn't deal with, now suddenly you can. Um, and that is relevant to the church because our ability as a church to go back 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago and investigate, we can't subpoena witnesses. Uh we don't have detectives. And so in many cases, it becomes one person's word against another in a church setting, whereas the secular society does have subpoena power and investigative power and so forth. And so if the secular society removes the status of limitations, they can go back and do a much more thorough job than we can. And so, so I say, by the way, uh, so so let me give you some resources, uh, but but obviously let me make another point. Among the ministers, I say it's statistically extremely small. However, there there are also cases of lay leaders or just church members. And actually, the majority of cases, it's in the family or step family. So they happen to be going to church, but church is not where the abuser met the abused, or it's not where the abuse was perpetrated, but because they are members of the church, it comes to the attention of the church, and maybe the abuser is somehow involved in some, you know, maybe they're singing in the choir or they're, you know, uh parking lot attendant or whatever, so they have some visibility in the church. Uh, but the root of most of these actually really is um not the church setting, but a family setting. That doesn't mean it's any less horrible, and that doesn't mean the church doesn't need to deal with it. But what I'm saying is it's not a problem created by the church. It is a problem that the church could handle well or not handle well. Now, let me give you some resources. We do have uh, if you go to upci.org, we do have a page forward slash safe church that gives all kinds of resources and it basically says if there is criminal conduct, you should go to the legal authorities. So we do not believe in cover-up, and we don't really believe the church is the best place to handle cases of criminal abuse. Uh so we want to cooperate with authority, legal authorities, because they're the ones that are going to have the ability to investigate. And we we what penalties can we impose? If it's a credential minister, we can take away their credentials, but they could still minister on their own somewhere. And and once they're no longer a member of us, we we have to be careful of invasion of privacy, even stating a true thing about them in such a way that could harm their reputation or their livelihood. So we're very limited in what we can do. They can go on to another church or another setting, and uh, you know, we can't prevent that. But if the law gets involved, the law can prevent that. So we do recommend if there's a case of criminal conduct, you should get the law involved. We don't want to cover up. We don't think we can handle it comprehensively. Now, if there's a complaint against a member of a local church that may or may not be criminal, but the pastor is the logical person, or there may be a church board member that is an appropriate person to report. If it involves a credential minister, it should be reported to the district superintendent. And we have a procedure, it's called a judicial procedure. You can file a complaint, and so the district superintendent can explain the proper way to do that. And some people say, well, we have to go through a process, that's not fair, you should just deal with it. Well, in the ideal world, maybe so, but even in the secular system, you have to go through a process because you have to presume that a person's innocent to proven guilty. And there are cases, every so often I've had to deal with cases of false accusations as verified by the secular system. So I can't just presume a person's guilty. I have to presume innocence to prove guilty, you have to protect their rights. And also you have to protect against false accusations, but you have to have due process. So we're a voluntary organization. We can't investigate a person's private life. But if they're a credential minister, they have given us consent to follow our own judicial procedure. So if we follow our procedure, we can deal with that person's credentials. But if we don't follow our procedure, then we could be guilty of violating their rights and be liable for criminal civil penalties. Or whatever we impose could be overturned. So even though, you know, people say, well, why do we have to go through this writing a formal complaint and signing it and sending it to the district superintendent? Well, we have to have that process, or we can't, we're not allowed by law to deal with the situation the way it needs to be done with dealt with. Okay, so if you go to upc.org org forward slash safe church, you will see that explanation that I've just described. You will see uh official position paper of the UPCI, which is also in our manual, available to all ministers. Um and it's uh but it's there on that website, it's called abuse and sexual misconduct. So that is our official position for all forms of abuse and sexual misconduct. We also have an article by me. It's called When Abuse Comes to Church, and it talks in detail what's the proper way to deal with abuse. First of all, how do we prevent a culture of abuse? But then if abuse happens, whether it's outside the church and the abused person is now coming to the church for help, or whether it happens in a church context or with a church member, what's the what should the church do? So I have a whole article about that. Um so what has the and then we have other resources. We have sample policies for churches to implement to help prevent abuse and and deal properly with any accusations of abuse. We have some training videos, uh, and we're adding more videos. Some are toward the church where you can train your volunteer workers and paid workers of the church, the district camps, Sunday school, children's ministry, youth ministry. Uh, we're producing those. We also have some videos for people who have been abused. So we're trying to do both and we're trying to add. We do have a safe church committee, which uh if someone wants assistance, they can contact the safe church committee and we can talk with them about how to respond. Uh for ministers and their families, we do have an endorsed uh counseling service that is it's on its own, but we recommend it. Uh, points of refuge. And then for everyone, we have an endorsed counseling network, uh, the Center for Apostolic Counseling. These are separate from the UPCI, but endorsed by the UPCI. We also have helping hands, where it's it is a separate foundation, but we have a relationship with them. If someone has been abused in the context of the church and they need counseling, we can refer them and we can sign that this is a legitimate claim. And then that separate foundation can provide counseling. So this is a way that even though the church may not have any responsibility in a legal sense, but because we want to minister to people who have been abused, we have ways of giving them counseling even before there's a legal determination of what who's guilty or who's responsible. You know, our interest is not just what is the legal outcome, our interest is helping hurting people, no matter who they are. So we do have several avenues to do that, uh, which we feel are very important. But to say, what has the UPCI done? So in 2019, we adopted that position paper, which is quite comprehensive. In 2020, we were not able to have a full general conference because of COVID. But in 2021, uh, we at our general conference we have a minister session. Uh, so perhaps you'd have a thousand ministers there. And so we devoted that whole session to Safe Church and to this presentation of how to prevent abuse and how to deal with abuse. And then in 2021, that article that I mentioned earlier, which was uh a summary or um uh a transcript of my part of the presentation, uh, was put in forward, which is our magazine distributed free to all the ministers in the U.S. and Canada. Uh, and so then from there, we have trained our general board uh and various districts. We're providing training to each district at their request. And so each district is doing its own thing, of course. Also, we have training for all ministers. So I have recorded a video that every person who's seeking minister credentials, or if they already have credentials and they're seeking to go to the next level from local license to general or general to ordination, this is a video that accompanies the manual. So they're supposed to read the relevant section of the manual, but they're supposed to watch the video where I do like I'm doing now, but in a little more detail and go through the steps. So we're trying to, in other words, we're trying to provide training for every minister in multiple formats. And we've also amended our judicial procedure, and we have uh more proposals that will be more specific. As we get experience, we learn what are the stumbling blocks or what are the difficulties, what uh, you know, because our judicial procedure is written to cover all hypothetical cases of ministerial misconduct from ethics to finances to doctrine to morals. Uh, but when you deal with child abuse, there are some specific issues. And so we're trying to streamline that track to deal specifically and efficiently and effectively. And then we're providing training for those who are involved in administering the judicial procedure. So they will have, because they may not have had a background of any experience, so we're providing training and professional support, and that's another thing the Safe Church Committee is trying to do is making sure that if we when we deal with these cases, we have trained people who are advising the authorities who are responsible for the administration of the judicial procedure. And I can tell you, we've spent many, many hours uh working through this process. We did have um a case like this, uh, and it went through our judicial procedure uh to a trial. It's the first time in 25 years we've actually had a church trial, but it did result in a conviction and a removal of that minister uh from the UPCI because of a history uh many years ago, actually before he became a minister, but of misconduct with minors. But we felt like whether it's after getting credentials or before, this kind of character flaw and this kind of track record disqualifies a person for a position of leadership over other people. So we take it that seriously. But 90% of the time, when there is a credible allegation of this nature, we go to the minister and we ask for their immediate resignation and receive it. And we say, look, if you go through a process in the legal system and you document this is false, then you come back and we'll reconsider your minister application. But because of the nature of the allegations and because of the credibility, you know, because there is a strong statement, we're recommending that you withdraw from active ministry at this time until the matter is resolved, and we recommend you turn in your credentials with UPCI until the matter is all. So 90% of the time, that's what happens. But if the person says, no, I'm innocent, this is absolutely false, I want to fight it, well, obviously, we want to give them every right and uh we we go through the full judicial process. And as I've said, there have been a few cases where the person was exonerated. They said, no, I I will I want to remain uh on the roll because I will be able to prove my case. And it turns out that was correct, and we understand that. So it's a very important issue. It's an ongoing process, but I can tell you that we are dealing with it very seriously, and I think we're becoming uh more and more effective as time goes on. I'm hoping we're helping to mold and shape a culture of awareness, understanding that we're gonna prevent a lot of potential cases. And then, if there are some cases, we're gonna be able to deal with it appropriately up front to minimize the damage so that there are no subsequent victims. And that's my goal. And then to provide help to those who have been victimized. And um, so those are some big, difficult, ambitious goals, but we are making significant progress.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Thank you for listening to this episode of Apostolic Life in the 21st Century. If you enjoy this podcast, please take a moment to give us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. We also appreciate it when you share apostolic life in the 21st century with a friend or family member. And make plans to join us again next time as we look at how the Bible applies to everyday life.