Safe Ministry Monthly: An Update from Our Executive Director

If you had to paint your year as a picture, what would it look like? What things would you want to put in there to express how things went? What colours would you use? Would you make a collage of photos or stick to paint? Would this years picture look the same as the last?

One year ago today, Safe Ministry Check made some enormous changes. We changed our name, we changed our pricing, and we changed some small features too. At the time there were a few hiccups, but now our system is stronger and more efficient than ever before, and the feedback we’ve had has been amazing!

But even with all these changes, our goal has still remained the same: To make Australian churches safe places for vulnerable people.

Our vision from the get go was to help churches do the right thing. Coming out of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, we realised that fulfilling all of the requirements to make churches safe spaces for vulnerable people was going to take a lot of churches a lot of time, or a lot of money. Churches were going to need to develop resources, do regular checking, find time to train people, and then train the people who couldn’t make it to the training. We wanted to provide a simple, cost effective solution so that churches didn’t feel swamped by their legal and insurance requirements.

When we changed our name and pricing last year, we made our solution to this problem even more accessible, having reduced prices and increasing the level of automation our system performed; even more value for a lower cost. Why? Because our passion for safety in churches is constantly driving us to make things easier.

This past year we’ve seen tens of thousands of people screened for ministry and even more people have received training. January and February 2021 have been our biggest months of training ever. It’s actually really exciting to see people accessing training, not just when it requires updating, but when members and volunteers feel the need to refresh their training themselves. That’s something we’d love to encourage you to encourage your church. Why not send a personal email to someone who has done the training to say that you’re thankful for the time and effort they’ve put in to getting it done?

Over the next twelve months, we’re excited to see what the next painting looks like. We expect that some of it will look a bit different; we have a range of new features that will launch over the coming months, including integrated national police checks.

But in some ways, our picture will look the same because our goal remains unchanged: To make Australian churches safe places for vulnerable people.

– Dave Moore

Photo by Kyrie kim on Unsplash