Safeguarding in the Church: Why Is It So Difficult to Get Right?

 Introducing This Guest Blog:

Fr Robert Thompson, Image courtesy of Channel 4

In this guest blog, Fr Robert Thompson, Vicar of St Mary's with All Souls', Kilburn, and St James's and the Sherriff Centre, West Hampstead, reflects on the deeper cultural and institutional challenges that continue to shape safeguarding in the Church.

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There is a reason safeguarding in the Church feels endlessly painful, exhausting, defensive, and unresolved. It is because safeguarding was never simply about safeguarding. It was always about power. And the Church has never been particularly comfortable talking honestly about power.

The public conversation usually focuses on failures of process. More training. Better policies. New audits. Independent reviews. Fresh guidance. Mandatory reporting debates. Revised governance structures. Every scandal produces another layer of institutional machinery intended to reassure the public that lessons have been learned. Yet somehow the same patterns continue repeating themselves across denominations, traditions, dioceses, networks, ministries, and churches that otherwise appear to have very little in common.

That is because the deepest safeguarding problem in the Church is not administrative incompetence. It is cultural and theological self-protection.

The Church struggles with safeguarding because safeguarding fundamentally threatens the myths many churches rely upon to function. The myth that spiritual authority naturally produces moral safety. The myth that “good” churches cannot become dangerous. The myth that successful ministries must also be healthy ministries. The myth that leaders who preach convincingly must therefore possess integrity. The myth that unity is more important than conflict. The myth that forgiveness resolves accountability. The myth that protecting the Church’s witness sometimes requires silence.

Safeguarding disrupts all of that.

It forces institutions to confront the possibility that abuse does not merely exist outside the Church, but can thrive within its very structures. Worse still, it forces churches to recognise that abuse often flourishes not in spite of church culture, but because of it.

Abusive church cultures rarely look abusive at first glance. That is one of the reasons people struggle so much to recognise them. They often look vibrant, warm, orthodox, fruitful, hospitable, growing, mission-focused, and spiritually serious. There are smiling welcome teams, passionate worship, polished sermons, safeguarding policies displayed on websites, DBS certificates in filing cabinets, and leaders talking publicly about accountability and humility. From the outside, everything appears safe. Sometimes even from the inside.

But safeguarding failures rarely begin with obvious monsters behaving monstrously in plain sight. They begin with environments where certain people become increasingly difficult to challenge. Where charisma starts outranking accountability. Where concerns become reframed as disloyalty. Where people learn, quietly and gradually, which truths are safe to say aloud and which truths carry social consequences.

This is what makes safeguarding in church settings uniquely complicated. Churches are not merely organisations. They are meaning-making communities. They shape identity, belonging, morality, relationships, family life, and spiritual reality itself. When harm occurs within churches, people are not simply losing trust in an employer or institution. They are often losing trust in God, community, vocation, friendship, certainty, and themselves all at once.

That creates enormous psychological pressure to minimise concerns before they destabilise the wider system.

And institutions become extraordinarily skilled at minimising.

Sometimes this happens deliberately. Sometimes unconsciously. Often both simultaneously.

The Church has become remarkably sophisticated at performing safeguarding without actually surrendering to the implications of safeguarding. Policies exist. Training happens. Audits are commissioned. Public statements are carefully written. Yet beneath the surface, many institutions remain deeply resistant to the actual redistribution of power safeguarding requires.

Because real safeguarding is disruptive.

Real safeguarding means accepting that victims may tell the truth about popular leaders. It means accepting that safeguarding concerns may expose institutional cowardice, theological manipulation, financial dependency, class privilege, clericalism, sexism, spiritual narcissism, or decades of collective denial. It means recognising that sometimes the problem is not simply one dangerous individual but an entire culture organised around protecting that individual from scrutiny.

That is why whistleblowers so often become organisational threats.

Not because they are necessarily wrong. But because they force institutions into moral confrontation with themselves.

Churches frequently describe themselves as communities of repentance and truth. Yet institutionally they often behave like every other reputation-protective system in existence. Sometimes worse, because churches possess theological language capable of transforming accountability into perceived persecution.

People raising concerns are accused of bitterness, division, unforgiveness, gossip, lacking grace, attacking the mission, harming the witness of the Church, or undermining unity. Entire congregations can be conditioned to view scrutiny itself as spiritually dangerous. Leaders are elevated as uniquely “anointed” or “called,” creating atmospheres where challenging them begins to feel emotionally and spiritually transgressive.

The result is that ordinary safeguarding concerns acquire enormous symbolic weight. A complaint is never just a complaint. It becomes a perceived threat to the ministry, the church family, the vision, the mission, the movement, sometimes even the gospel itself.

And once that happens, self-preservation instincts take over.

One of the darkest realities within church safeguarding is that institutions often appear more emotionally distressed by public exposure than by the harm itself. The scandal becomes the crisis. Media coverage becomes the crisis. Social media criticism becomes the crisis. Reputational fallout becomes the crisis. The suffering that produced those things can begin to feel secondary.

 This is why survivors and whistleblowers so often describe experiences of profound secondary harm after disclosure. The original abuse may have been devastating, but the institutional response frequently compounds the trauma. People encounter defensiveness, delay, silence, sanitised communications, carefully managed processes, selective listening, legal caution, and subtle attempts to contain reputational damage while publicly insisting that safeguarding remains the highest priority.

The language of care remains. But people increasingly sense the machinery underneath it.

And perhaps the hardest truth of all is that many churches genuinely do not realise how unsafe they have become. Harm becomes normalised slowly. Power concentrates gradually. Fear settles quietly into organisational life. Staff learn what not to say. Congregations adapt around strong personalities. Certain individuals become untouchable because they are financially valuable, socially influential, spiritually admired, or institutionally connected.

Over time, dysfunction stops feeling dysfunctional.

It simply becomes “how things are.”

This is one reason why external scrutiny provokes such intense reactions in religious settings. Independent safeguarding often feels threatening because it introduces moral language the institution can no longer fully control. It interrupts the internal storytelling mechanisms churches use to preserve coherence. Suddenly behaviour that was reframed as “strong leadership,” “passion,” “spiritual authority,” or “protecting the vision” begins being described in plainer terms: coercion, intimidation, manipulation, abuse of power, unsafe practice.

And many institutions would rather defend the illusion of goodness than survive the humiliation of honesty.

There are, of course, churches trying sincerely to do this well. There are clergy, safeguarding officers, trustees, and volunteers carrying enormous emotional burdens with integrity and compassion. There are communities willing to confront painful truths and change course. But the churches that tend to become safer are rarely the ones most obsessed with protecting their image.

They are usually the ones willing to tolerate discomfort.

The ones willing to hear things that damage morale. The ones willing to admit institutional failure without immediately reaching for public relations strategies. The ones willing to recognise that safeguarding is not an external threat to the Church, but a test of whether the Church truly believes its own moral teachings when power becomes costly.

Because ultimately safeguarding is not really about whether churches can produce policies. Most churches can do that. It is about whether they can relinquish the fantasy that spiritual institutions are naturally safer than everyone else.

History suggests they are not.

And until the Church becomes more afraid of its own capacity for self-deception than it is of reputational embarrassment, safeguarding will continue to struggle.

Not because the solutions are unknown.

But because the cost of truth remains one many institutions are still unwilling to pay.

~Fr Robert Thompson