New Affinity member – Christian Safeguarding Services

Christian Safeguarding Services (CSS) aims to support evangelical churches and Faith Based Organisations (FBOs) to achieve best practice in safeguarding children, young people and adults at risk of abuse. We approach safeguarding from a biblical perspective and help churches to develop practice that flows naturally from our gospel principles while at the same time, complying with national guidance. It is a project developed and run by Phasic Ltd, which is a specialist training and consultancy business delivering training to organisations across the public, private voluntary and faith sectors.

Paul and Sue Harrison own and run Phasic. Paul has previously worked within health, education and social care; managing projects and developing and managing services. He now splits his time between Phasic (CSS) and his role as preaching elder in an independent evangelical church. Sue is actively involved in the church and also works within a local authority managing the Learning and Development team who deliver professional development services and training to the children’s workforce, including social care staff. They both have decades of experience in children and youth work within the church and of working to support families who have children with Special Educational Needs and disabilities.

From a safeguarding perspective, we are living in times of extensive and rapid change. There are ever-increasing expectations of organisations who work with vulnerable people, demanding ever-higher standards and ever greater transparency and accountability. We are also seeing significant cultural shifts and attitude changes that are increasingly challenging traditional evangelical values. There are voices calling for regulation of churches and other voluntary sector organisations and we are seeing claims that traditional evangelical views and practices are abusive. In this environment we need to be wise and rigorous in the way we approach safeguarding.

Unfortunately, many churches are stuck in a time-warp. They brought themselves into compliance with legislation and guidance in the 1990s to mid 2000s and have continued assuming that they meet the required standards without appreciating the scale and speed of change. The days when it was sufficient to have a safeguarding policy and run DBS checks on staff and volunteers are long since gone.

CSS is about supporting churches to meet these challenges in a biblically faithful way. They provide a flexible range of services from free information provided from their website through to a full membership scheme that provides complete support for all safeguarding needs in a cost effective way.

For more information about how they can help churches and FBOs, please visit their website: www.thecss.co.uk , contact them by e-mail on info@thecss.co.uk or call on 07960 751778.