The most important safeguard

We take seriously our responsibility to be a safe community, and the policies and procedures below are a genuine expression of that commitment. But we want to say something honestly before you read them: no amount of good policy can guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. Church communities are built on trust, and any community built on trust will experience breaches of that trust from time to time. We have seen this in our own history.

What good policy can do is ensure that when things go wrong, we know how to respond — that there are clear pathways for raising concerns, clear accountability structures, and clear consequences for misconduct. That matters enormously, and we have worked to get it right.

But the deeper protection is culture, not policy. A community in which people feel genuinely safe to speak, to name concerns, to hold one another accountable — that is what actually keeps people safe. And culture is not something that leadership alone can create or maintain. It is something we are all responsible for, together. How we treat one another, how we respond when someone raises a concern, how willing we are to hear difficult things — these are the real indicators of whether this is a safe community.

The policies below are important. Please read them. But they work best when they sit inside a culture that makes them rarely necessary.

Our commitments

This church has adopted a Safe Church Policy which complies with current legislation and sets out our commitments to ensuring that our church is a safe place for all people, especially children and those most vulnerable to being overlooked or marginalised. We also have a Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy which provides more detailed commitments in relation to the protection of children and young people, in line with the Victorian Child Safe Standards. We also have a Policy on the Accountability of Pastors, which includes requirements for annual reviews, external supervision, and ongoing professional development. Our pastors are bound by the Baptist Union of Victoria’s Code of Ethics for Pastors. All these documents are available below. Our pastors and lay leaders all hold current Working with Children checks, and our pastors and Host Group periodically attend Safe Church Awareness training run by the BUV.

If you have concerns

If you believe that a pastor, leader, or member of this church has behaved — toward you or anyone else — in a way that is inappropriate, unethical, abusive, or criminal, please report your concerns. We would rather hear something that turns out to be a misunderstanding than not hear something that needed to be heard.

The documents

Safe Church Policy 
Our Safe Church Policy includes a code of ethics for adult interaction with children, and appended fact sheets explaining the nature of various offences against children and the expected procedures for responding to them.

Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy 
Our Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy sets out our commitments under the Victorian Child Safe Standards in relation to the protection and wellbeing of children and young people.

Policy on the Accountability of Pastors 
Our Policy on the Accountability of Pastors includes requirements for annual reviews, external supervision, and ongoing professional development.

Pastoral Code of Ethics 
Anyone we employ as a pastor must have signed and pledged to abide by the Baptist Union of Victoria’s Pastoral Code of Ethics.

BUV Complaint Procedure for Allegations of Misconduct by Pastoral Leaders 
The Baptist Union of Victoria’s Complaint Procedure sets out the formal process for handling complaints of misconduct against pastoral leaders, including how complaints are received, investigated, and determined, and the rights of both complainants and respondents throughout the process.