A Trip Downunder
You may have noticed that the Blog has been quiet for the past few weeks. That is because I just returned from a trip to Australia where I was the guest of Safe Church Ministries. I did training for them in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. I also keynoted their conference in Sydney, “Safe As Churches?” My first visit to Australia was around 15 years ago when I worked with Uniting Church leaders and others to begin to address clergy misconduct and abuse issues. Then 5 years later, I spoke at a national ecumenical conference during which I began to see the early efforts across denominations to put policy and procedures in place to address complaints of clergy misconduct.
You may have noticed that the Blog has been quiet for the past few weeks. That is because I just returned from a trip to Australia where I was the guest of Safe Church Ministries. I did training for them in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. I also keynoted their conference in Sydney, “Safe As Churches?”
My first visit to Australia was around 15 years ago when I worked with Uniting Church leaders and others to begin to address clergy misconduct and abuse issues. Then 5 years later, I spoke at a national ecumenical conference during which I began to see the early efforts across denominations to put policy and procedures in place to address complaints of clergy misconduct.
So I was very pleased to see the progress that church leaders are making. Two things were particularly encouraging. First was the national conference, “Safe As Churches?” This was the sixth gathering of denominational leaders from most of the major denominations and from around the country. The participants were the people currently tasked at the regional and national levels with responding to complaints and doing prevention training with clergy and laity. 180 people attended from a wide variety of traditions: Anglicans, Salvation Army, Uniting Church, Lutherans, Baptists, Roman Catholics and many others. They have been meeting each year for networking, training, and fellowship. This means that they have developed an ecumenical peer group to support their work which is a huge resource to those for whom working as the point person on clergy misconduct within a denominational structure can be a lonely job.
I talked about the institutional crisis of our faith institutions and the persistent conflict between an institutional protection agenda and a justice-making agenda. This discussion seemed to resonate with their experiences.
We don’t have any occasion like this in the U.S. By and large, our national and regional denominational leaders working on clergy misconduct don’t have a venue in which to talk to each other or learn from each other’s experiences. This is a problem we in the U.S. need to address.
The second encouraging thing I experienced was the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This is a national, public inquiry into child sexual abuse that was often tolerated and covered up by both religious and public institutions and organizations. From everything I could see, the Commission is very serious about its task: they want to hear from individual survivors and they are subpoenaing all records of cases of child sexual abuse from every church organization. The government has allocated the necessary resources for a thorough review of the history of child sexual abuse in Australia.
Survivors are coming forward. Most are cautiously optimistic that the truth will finally be told even though it will take years. The question that remains is: what will happen next? What will be the outcome of this investigation?
But we cannot over emphasize the importance of the truth-telling process both for individual survivors and their families but also for institutions and faith communities. For individuals to be heard and for institutions to face their neglect and collusion in the widespread abuse of children that has thrived in the shadows for generations is a major step forward. The particular experience of indigenous people who were put in residential schools and abused must be named and acknowledged if we are to be able to say, “never again.”
So I return home newly challenged in my own work, encouraged by colleagues on the other side of the world, and with renewed commitment to the task. The generous hospitality of the Aussies and the opportunity for some vacation time were bonuses. I was able to go to see Uluru and Kata Juta (Ayers Rock) in central Australia which was a remarkable experience of the outback and indigenous cultures there. And I rode a camel to watch the sun rise over Uluru. It’s a long story but was a grand experience.
Rev. Dr. Marie M. Fortune
FaithTrust Institute
www.faithtrustinstitute.org
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