Safe Churches are a Priority for Seven-Day Adventists

The Seventh - day Adventist church is taking a step that many other corporations have done: they are putting their employees through background checks in an attempt to help keep children safe. Though the Seventh-day Adventists are technically a religious organization, they have employees just like any other corporation and they are taking on the responsibility of performing background checks on their employees in order to keep their churches safe from misconduct and abuse, something that has plagued other religious organizations in recent years.

In addition to performing background checks on employees and volunteers, the church is also using education in order to teach both children and adults what is right or wrong when it comes to conduct and interactions with each other. They want to make sure that the church is a safe place for children to be and have really made a lot of progress, more so than other churches, when it comes to making sure they are covering all the ground they can.

Some of the other things that the church is doing, short of background checks and education, is making many of their employees mandated reporters, which means they are obligated to report any misconduct or wrongdoing to the powers that be. This includes anything that can be seen as a crime against a child. The great thing about this is that it has been in place since 2003, much sooner than many corporations began doing this. Though the check on volunteers was not added until 2011, the church, overall, has been very proactive about setting up a very safe environment for children. Volunteers include those members of the church who teach religious classes to children, those who work with church youth groups and anyone involved in the youth programs of the church.

Organizations, like the Seventh-day Adventist church, who are taking the responsible route when it comes to background checks could really benefit from using a third party like backgroundchecks.com. This background check company has many products that really help organizations get a thorough view of their employees. One of these products is known as the US Offender OneSEARCH and would be very helpful to the church as it searches for matches against sex offender databases all over the country. The church has a responsibility not to allow sex offenders near children and using these products is an excellent way to go about it.

About backgroundchecks.com -

backgroundchecks.com - a founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS®) - serves thousands of customers nationwide, from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies by providing comprehensive screening services.  Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with an Eastern Operations Center in Chapin, S.C., backgroundchecks.com is home to one of the largest online criminal conviction databases in the industry. For more information about backgroundchecks’ offerings, please visit www.backgroundchecks.com.

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Source: http://news.adventist.org/en/archive/articles/2012/02/21/safe-churches-a-priority-for-adventist-risk-management