Turning Safeguarding Upside Down: Jesus started with the least – so should we

BY NATHAN LARKIN

There are two ways to approach safeguarding in the Church: ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’.

The difference sounds technical, even semantic, but it’s not. It’s theological and it’s moral. It’s about where the Church begins its thinking, and where it draws the line when things get messy.

A ‘top-down’ approach to safeguarding

In the top-down model, everything starts with the institution. There’s already a diocese, a parish, a PCC, a leadership structure and because these structures exist, they must now safeguard those in their care. So, we write policies. We draft procedures. We book training days and send out endless documents that ripple their way down the system. And somewhere, right at the bottom of the pile, their impact finally reaches the people that safeguarding was meant to protect in the first place: the vulnerable, the wounded, and those on the margins.

This is top-down safeguarding. It’s well-intentioned and it looks organised, it even sounds caring, but when a crisis inevitably hits, we suddenly see what it’s really built to protect…

Not the people but the institution. The real priority isn’t safety, it’s survival. The show must go on. And if abuse happens… well, that’s a terrible shame.

In every sense, this approach isn’t good enough.

A ‘bottom-up’ approach to safeguarding

A bottom-up model, on the other hand, starts where Jesus started, with ‘the least, the last, and the lost’. It begins with those who need protecting and builds everything else around them. Our structures, our culture and our policies should grow out of one simple question: what will keep the vulnerable safe? If we can do that, it will be more than good safeguarding, it will be what the Kingdom of God looks like in real life.

This is because God’s Kingdom always moves from the margins toward the centre. It starts with the people everyone else overlooks, and as Jesus said: ‘Whatever you did for the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me’ (Matthew 25.40)

When safeguarding protects the Church, not the child

This all came into sharp focus for me recently during a safeguarding course run by my diocese.

We were working through a fictional case study. A man in a church context – friendly, well-liked, but showing worrying patterns around young people and refusing accountability to church leadership. Alarm bells were ringing…

We then learned that similar concerns had been raised in a previous parish and that when he was challenged, he had simply left. When challenged at the second church, he left again. And that’s where the case study ended.

Apparently, that was that. The person moved on… twice! Someone else’s problem now.

I remember sitting there thinking: ‘Wait, what? If the structures were aware that there had been issues before, then why wasn’t this information shared when the man first arrived? Why wasn’t there a quiet word, a pastoral caution with a note of this kept on file?’ The danger had already been identified, yet the next church walked into this blind.

When I pressed the course leader, the answer was painfully familiar. It would be ‘inappropriate’ to pass that information on because no actual offence had yet been committed. It would be unfair to the individual in question. But most worryingly, it was also because we might ‘get into trouble.’

I couldn’t believe he was saying this part out loud. Get into trouble with whom?

Certainly not with God, whose Son warned, ‘The last will be first’ (Matthew 19.30).

Certainly not with Jesus, who risked his reputation to defend the vulnerable and rebuked those who used the law to justify harm (Mark 7.9-13; John 8.1-11).

No, the only trouble we often seem worried about is institutional – the threat to the Church.

The person in the case study was himself arguably vulnerable: confused, defensive and isolated. He needed pastoral care. But more importantly, he posed a risk. And somehow, the system had decided that protecting the Church from procedural trouble was a higher priority than protecting real people from possible harm.

That’s what top-down safeguarding does. It protects the structure first, and the vulnerable second. It asks, ‘What’s safest for the Church?’ rather than ‘Who’s safest in the Church?’

And that’s how, time after time, abuse stories unfold along the same weary pattern. We follow the rules. We document our care. We tick the boxes. Then, when someone is abused, we sigh, apologise, and issue another report about ‘learned lessons.’

The ‘sherry defence’

When I pushed against the senselessness of this on the course, the trainer added, half-jokingly, that ‘what two vicars talk about over a glass of sherry is, of course, another matter.’

He meant it kindly and as a hint towards the legitimacy of informal information sharing. But the phrase landed like a punch. It summed up the problem in a nutshell: a system that publicly follows the letter of safeguarding law, while privately endorsing gossip over transparency: the informal chat becoming a substitute for genuine accountability.

It’s an attitude that basically says: We know what we should do, but we can’t really do it. Let’s just keep things running, hope things don’t go wrong and be kind to ourselves if they do.

This is what happens when safeguarding proceeds top-down. By the time the policy meets the practice, all the urgency has drained away. Procedures become an excuse and the instinct for self-protection takes over, leaving the most vulnerable badly exposed.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that this is the case because people are simply evil and want to facilitate abuse. It is instead because the culture is completely upside down.

It’s in that upside-down world that even the most well-meaning leaders start thinking, ‘we’ve done our best; we have to work with what we’ve got’. They say it like a lament but it’s actually a confession of misplaced loyalty because when we start from the institution, we’ll always end up serving the institution.

But it’s only when we start from the vulnerable that we’ll build the Church that Jesus intends us to be.

The Church as a ‘honey trap’

What makes this situation even harder to swallow is that it is the best parts of church that make the problem so dangerous. Churches should be places of welcome, warmth and belonging and at their best, they really are. This is exactly why people who are hurting or lonely or vulnerable are drawn in. It is also why we have such a serious responsibility to get safeguarding right.

But when we build such beautiful, welcoming communities and don’t put the vulnerable at the centre of our safeguarding, we end up creating a kind of ‘honey trap’ for the very people who most need protection. We promise safety, belonging and grace but behind the scenes, our systems are designed to keep us safe, not them. We might not mean it this way, but its spiritual entrapment all the same.

However, it needs saying plainly: if we cannot safeguard the vulnerable, we should not have churches. No theology, no tradition, no institution is worth keeping if it keeps putting the weak at risk.

The Church doesn’t exist to keep itself alive; it exists to serve the Kingdom of God. And if our structures can’t do this safely, they need to be taken apart and built again — from the bottom up.

Turning the Church upside down

In the Gospels, we read how Jesus turns the world on its head. He begins not with power but with weakness, not with structures but with compassion. He doesn’t say, ‘Blessed are the well-organised and fully compliant’, but ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit… Blessed are the meek.’ He starts at the bottom, and he builds up from there. This is not just a nice idea; it’s the pattern for how the Church is supposed to work and it’s the blueprint for safeguarding too.

So, what would it look like to really turn safeguarding upside down?

It would mean asking, in every diocesan meeting, every training session, every review: What does this mean for the most vulnerable person in our care?

It would mean measuring our policies not by how well they protect our bishops, vicars or our church’s reputations, but by how safe they make a survivor of abuse feel when they walk into church for the first time.

It would mean accepting that the risk is ours to carry, not theirs. That’s exactly what Jesus did… he carried the risk, he absorbed the cost, he took the blame.

If we can start from there, then everything changes… but if we can’t start there then maybe we shouldn’t start at all…

The call to repentance and courage

We’ve had enough reports. Enough reviews. Enough carefully worded statements about ‘lessons learned’. What we need is repentance from the very agenda that has produced much of our safeguarding.

Such repentance requires courage. The courage to stop protecting our own skin and start protecting the people God has trusted us with. The courage to admit that our systems aren’t broken but working exactly for the purpose that they were built. And that’s the problem…

We keep trying to tidy up the machinery when what’s needed is to turn the whole system over. This is because the gospel doesn’t polish power; it overturns tables. If our churches are truly of God, they’ll survive the encounter with truth and start being what they are meant to be. God doesn’t need our spin, he just asks for honesty.

The Kingdom of God has always moved from the margins to the centre, never the other way round. Our safeguarding must learn to follow it there, and until it does, every apology will sound and be hollow and every reform half-hearted. Jesus said, ‘The last will be first,’ so let’s start at the bottom, where he did, with ‘the last, the least and the lost’ – the ones we were meant to protect all along.

Nathan Larkin is Youth and Children’s Minister at Christ Church, New Malden