Mennonite Central Committee

Professional Safeguards

Pastors/other professionals need to continually remind themselves and their peers to hold the standard high in the area of ethics/Christian ethics, particularly sexual ethics. As a professional/clergy you have a moral responsibility to prevent injurious behaviours while maintaining the integrity of your professional relationships formed over the course of your career.

 

• Preventative steps to guard against boundary violations
• Questions Clergy Need to Ask Themselves
• Inappropriate and Unacceptable Behaviour by a Clergy

 

• Preventative steps for pastors/church leaders to guard against pastoral sexual misconduct

  1. Be Uncompromisingly Honest With Yourself - Besides the sense of call from God to the ministry, personal needs drew you to the ministry. The more you are in touch with what is inside you as a human being, the better prepared you will be to seek out necessary and helpful resources to help you maintain the trust placed in you. If you have a feeling that things are moving in an unhealthy direction, act with prudence.
  2. Actively Maintain Relationships and Interests Outside Your Ministry Setting - Enlarge your identity beyond your professional life. It may not be that your isolation is the problem rather interpersonal passivity apart from your ministry role. Build networks for personal support and professional growth outside of your congregation so that you have appropriate peers to form healthy relationships with.
  3. Empathetic Detachment - Cultivate the difficult yet necessary art and skill of empathetic detachment so you are available but not "available". This may diminish the possibility of forming unhealthy counselling relationships.
  4. Self-Care - Take time for yourself to - love and nurture yourself - so that you are not looking for love and nurture in inappropriate ways with inappropriate individuals. Do not try to heal yourself through your counselling relationships with parishioners.
  5. Remember God Calls You To Servant Ministry - You are called to equip or meet the needs of others for the sake of the Gospel. In order to serve others, you must ensure your own needs are met in healthy and appropriate ways. God doesn't call leaders to serve at the cost of their own spiritual/physical/mental health.

   

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• Questions Pastors Need to Ask Themselves

  1. Do you know your risk areas?
  2. Do you consciously or subconsciously advocate or engage in non-erotic contact (hugs, pats, putting your arm around a shoulder) with parishioners?
  3. Do you ask unnecessary questions or details about a parishioners sex life?
  4. Do you take advantage of the power differential you hold over the parishioner because of your position of authority?
  5. Are you aware that people with past sexual assault/abuse may be more vulnerable to successive victimization?
  6. Do you consider yourself to be above or beyond boundary violation?
  7. Do you have peers with whom you meet regularly and are accountable to?
  8. Have you confronted and reconciled any past sexual abuse, exploitation, or harassment in your own life?
  9. If you have experienced a boundary violation with a congregant, have you referred that person to another counsellor and sought help for yourself?
  10. If you are married, are your devoting time and energy to strengthening your marriage relationship?
  11. Are you aware of boundary violations, manipulation, and dependence needs?
  12. Are you on guard for transference and counter-transference (with its potential to trigger the feeling that the pastor and only the pastor can save the congregant)?
  13. Are you aware of your denominations professional misconduct standards policy?
  14. Ensure your office and any other meeting areas have windows in the doors.
  15. If you have reasonable cause to suspect a congregant has been a victim of sexual abuse you are required by law to report it to the proper authorities.

  While dating a single congregant may not be a boundary violation, a pastor would need to approach a dating relationship within the congregation with extreme caution, clear accountability and transparency. Dating relationships between teacher and student, counsellor and client are prohibited.

   

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• Inappropriate and Unacceptable Behaviour by a Pastor

  • Sexualizing any relationship with a child, congregant, staff person, or persons one is called to serve
  • Use of pornography, particularly with youth or children
  • Continuing a counselling relationship and contact with a congregant after inappropriate behaviour or attempts to sexualize the relationship has occurred
  • Sexual innuendos, jokes, and/or comments
  • Behaves seductively and flirtatiously
  • Using information learned in a professional role to manipulate a person
  • Utilizing a congregant relationship to meet personal and emotional needs
  • Holds secrets for the purpose of manipulation, hiding wrongdoing, or inviting one's victim into the secrecy
  • Demonizing an individual that he/she has victimized so others will be less likely to believe them or to divert accountability
  • Has knowledge of a colleague's misconduct and does nothing

   

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