Modern Church Leader
Hear pastors share what's working in their churches. Welcome to Modern Church Leader, a show for church leaders to learn business strategies, leadership skills, church tech tips, and generosity. Tune in for powerful interviews to help you grow your church to be more effective, efficient, and powerful for the kingdom of God. For more information, visit https://www.mclconference.com/
Modern Church Leader
How to Create an Abuse-Free Church w/ Greg Love of Ministry Safe
Can understanding the grooming process in churches save lives? Join us as we sit down with Gregory Love, a leading child abuse prevention expert and lawyer, to explore the vital strategies for safeguarding children in faith-based communities.
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Learn more about Ministry Safe at https://ministrysafe.com
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Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Modern Church Leader here with my buddy all the way from Dallas, Texas, Gregory Love. How's it going, Greg?
Speaker 1:We're doing great here in Fort Worth Texas.
Speaker 2:Well, let's go. Well, man, it's great to have you on the show. You are, you know you're kind of the expert in child abuse prevention and you are a lawyer and you started a great company, Ministry Safe. You've been at this for a long time, so I'd love for you just to tell folks a little bit about yourself and how you got into serving the church in this way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, of course, as a believer I'm interested in serving the church. I mean after doing like 29 years of student ministry. Yeah, church, I mean after doing like 29 years of student ministry. But professionally it's not like I was in law school in the eighties and decided you know, one day I want to be a sexual abuse lawyer. Okay, first of all, that's weird. Second of all, there was no such thing back then, kind of the way all of this unfolded.
Speaker 2:You couldn't. You couldn't pick your school and find the degree in that.
Speaker 1:No, no, that was a. That was a thin listing, all right, but nonetheless it's like my wife, who's my law partner, kimberly. I mean, she was an employment lawyer by trade as early as like 91, 1992. Okay, back when we used to draw on cave walls, okay. So back then there was a seminary student that was trying to work with children in a group home and they fired him for trying to report child sexual abuse. Okay, which in Texas you can fire someone for just about anything, but you can't fire them for trying to report under the mandatory reporting requirements. And of course, not only did they fire him just to make their point and don't mess with us they told him they blamed him for being the abuser. It's like we'll teach you Now. What they didn't know was that they forced him to sue them Because you see, if he wants to work with children, you can't go get a job working with children when you just lost your last job for ostensibly molesting them. So he went to look for a Christian employment lawyer and he went and he found my wife. Okay, so Kimberly's smart enough to know you don't make a lot of money representing a part-time seminary student who's fired for being a molester. But she heard his story, she believed him and it made her mad. And, frank, you and I are smart enough to know don't make Kim mad, right? So Kim took his case, which is essentially a whistleblower claim, back then. But part of a case like that in 1992 is we had to go find the people that were claiming to have been sexually and physically abused to kind of support the fact that he was making a good faith claim. Now, when she and I went back and talked to some of these people, it's amazing how many of these people wanted to tell their story and said hey, will you be my voice too? Kimberly's like absolutely let's, let them hear from you. Not knowing that she was essentially putting together a multi-plaintiff litigation against this group, home went after we talked to 49 victims of abuse covering a 30-year period of time, with multiple molesters wind up growing.
Speaker 1:At the same time, the Catholic Church was starting its adventure into child sexual abuse litigation. Now ours resolved before theirs did and had people from all over the country calling and saying, hey, we know that was worth money. Will you help us jump in on this fact? Will you help us sue this organization? Now, most of them were wanting us to sue a church, kim and I realized whoa part of our desire is to teach the church, and the church is not necessarily teachable when they feel like you're suing them on this side, right. So we decided now we're immersed in the issue.
Speaker 1:Okay, now we're standing over how this works. We're seeing the patterns, but see that pattern is a good word in child sexual abuse work. See, if something has a pattern, it's predictable, and if something's predictable, it's preventable. Unfortunately, it's just not intuitive. So Kimberly and I were using all of this background education, experience that we've developed in five or six years of litigating on behalf of victims and designed these are the things these organizations should have had in place so that there would have been no victims. Ok, it's developing a safety system, which we now call a five part safety system. I know, brilliant, catchy title, huh, ok, but it's five main pieces because this is what we learned from litigation and we're going to try to now provide that before there's a train wreck, so people can start to access those resources.
Speaker 1:Because we looked around and decided, like certainly somebody's doing this Right and as hard as we look, like there is no one Clearly hearing God telling us no, no, no, I want you guys to do this Now. I remember complaining to the Lord. It's like look, we're in the job business. Okay, we need to make money. Feed the little kid you gave us. Okay, we need to make money, feed the little kid you gave us. We can make money in litigation. There's not a lot of money to be made in prevention, especially when you're talking to the church, especially in the mid-90s, waiting for the church to wake up to its cancer. So we've spent the last 20, 25 years refining because, you see, the problem hasn't changed. Our children's and student ministries by and large haven't changed, but our culture has changed and it's getting angry. So here it all is. Come and get it Right, all right.
Speaker 2:So you spent it started with the litigation. How long did you? You said five years. So was it kind of a five-year journey where you're like, oh, wow, we can take a bunch of the things we learned because we interviewed so many victims and so many different cases where you learned, like here's the patterns. Now let me put it into, you know, some form of training. And then Ministry Safe was born, or was it? You started doing kind of training and coaching because churches were calling you and then one day you woke up and you're like, oh, I should, we should create a company that does this. Like what was the transition from cases to you know, starting Ministry Safe as a real like, as a business, like, as a company that does this? Like what was the transition from cases to you know, starting Ministry of Safe as a real like, as a business, like as a company serving the church?
Speaker 1:Well, we didn't stop litigating. Okay, that was an ongoing. Now, of course, we won't sue the church, but the narrow area in which Kim and I will continue to litigate is in the narrow context of children that were victimized in cult settings, where someone has abused and manipulated that religious structure to harm a child. So that is ongoing. But it's like created all these resources and we're working with mostly secular organizations at that point. Church didn't want this, not even our home church at first. But see, it was a lot of our foster care entities, our adoption entities, some of the people that are on the front line of this risk that don't need to be convinced, it's real. So it started to grow.
Speaker 1:Now it got to the point about 2007, with one enormous crisis that I won't identify to where it became valuable for the organization to be able to message to its parents that it's safe to bring your kids back to camp safe to bring your kids back to camp. They needed something to brag about and something to show them. This is what we're doing. But at the same time, they were in litigation and needed to be able to have some private conversations. So it's that when we realized we created Ministry Safe as opposed to the law firm which is Love Norris, because we split these up kind of like this Love Norris is like the 9-11 Commission you can climb into the ditch and help you evaluate your ditch-like and crater-like experience. Ministry Safe is like Homeland Security. These are the preventive tools that need to have a front-facing talk about this. Share this with your parents, let them know. This is what we're doing to address this foreseeable risk. That was about 2006.
Speaker 2:Okay, and churches weren't super into it yet. It was early, new whatever. But since then we're at 2024. Now, now you serve thousands of churches. So what's that journey been like? Because that's your heart, your passion, you know you wanted to help the church and help kids. So, like, how did you, how did it start working in churches? Like, how did that open up?
Speaker 1:Well, it that? That's a difficult question because you see, yeah, you're right, we're serving thousands of churches, like 25,000 at this count, probably be 35,000 maybe by February of 2025. And I can go Whoa, what a great job. Thousands of churches. But see, my heart is for the body of Christ, not a count. And when I realized there's 375,000 churches out there, in 25 years I'm serving less than 10% of them. Okay, I don't have another 25 years in me, and so my heart is a urgency that the fields are white in terms, at least the risk.
Speaker 1:But see, even rewinding, it's not like the church finally went. Oh, hey, I get this, because that's not the way the church behaves. Church is the stubborn bride. Okay, so, frankly, you can go back and you can do a timeline that certain segments of the population, usually by industry, are waking up by virtue of whatever crisis is nearby, whether it was the Catholic Church, whether it was Penn State, whether it was USA Swimming, which is what made the Olympic Committee call us to help design the Safe Sport Program, and then there was USA Gymnastics in 2015. And then we had Boy Scouts of America in 2020, 21.
Speaker 1:I mean, so it's these different crises wake different people up to certain degrees, and, of course, denominations are having their own crisis. As you know, the Southern Baptist Convention has been very driven by media and crisis, starting in 2018, 2019. And so it's. The church is just a funny bride, and so it's not like the church has finally awakened, because there's a whole lot more work to be done. I just I can't make it move faster, and that's why the Lord has led me to buy a yoga mat, a puppy room and all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 2:You went with the puppy room and not goat yoga, so you got the yoga mat. You just no, didn't I?
Speaker 1:tried goat yoga. I tried the wrong kind of goats Because I was envisioning the little baby goats that jump. These are like the old goats that bite. Yeah, didn't work out.
Speaker 2:No, oh my gosh. Well, so fast forward, we're here today. I guess, in all of this, your big passion is training and equipping churches. You want to help prevent this from happening. So how have you gone about doing that? What's kind of the hallmark of what Ministry Safe does for churches.
Speaker 1:Part of it is born out of the crisis, right, because if there was just like one, oh hey, everybody just needs a blue pill I'll just go start manufacturing blue pills and handing them out. So we're standing over the crisis and doing the forensic work and the postmortems on what went wrong and why. Once I help people understand what this risk is, for the sake of having the Q&A with those people in the ditch, it's the five words that I hate the most. Now that you mention it, it's like I hate those five words. Okay, I don't want you to get into a crisis and look back and go oh, now that you mentioned, I'm smarter now, even after all these people got hurt. Now I can move forward.
Speaker 1:It's like what is it that I can do to keep us from that? Dish? Like experience and what we learned early on is education. I can tell people you know what we need to stop sexual abuse, and 100 out of 100 people will tell me I agree with you, 100%, absolutely. But see, when I go into my churches, they think they're solving the problem. Okay, which is why this is my diagnostic question. I can ask this with a smile, you know, so I don't sound like a lawyer with a clipboard. It's like, hey, what do you do? At? Like, that list will not protect my child, okay, and so the barrier to overcome with the church is not that sexual abuse is an important deal, but they think they're solving this problem and they're not.
Speaker 2:And that wake-up call typically doesn't happen until they have a dish like experience yeah, you have security, you have cameras, you have check-in, you have background checks, so they're doing that. But you're going like that's all of those things are like fine and probably good, but that's not what actually does it. Those are like secondary to the core thing. So like, what have you what? What are the things that do it? Like, how, what do you train churches on to help them? You know, spot this kind of behavior or, you know, just be more educated on what really prevents it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the magic word there is not just training. Okay, there's all kinds of training out there. It's specific information to allow people to understand. This is the risk, and this is what it looks like, so kind of peeking behind the curtain. Most people misunderstand what is sexual abuse risk? Ok, they think it's the white van with free candy written on the side of it, driven by a guy with a clown suit. Ok, it's like it's the stranger danger idea, right, and so part of the training is deconstructing your misconception to make room for the information you need to have. And the need to have information is your risk is from an offender.
Speaker 1:We call the preferential offender, not the abduction offender. So when I ask people, hey, what do you do to protect children from child sexual abuse? And they give me that list. That's what I call the barbed wire fence. It's to keep the abduction offender out. You see, like a barbed wire fence around your garden, it'll protect your garden from the cattle, but the bunnies it's absolutely worthless. Okay, so I'm building a fence. I think it solves my problem and you know what? As it relates to the abduction offender, it is solving that problem. Merry Christmas, well done, you're doing a great job, but I need for my people to understand. The abduction offender represents less than 10% of the problem. So, as it relates to that minute part of the problem, your little barbed wire fence is crushing it. Keep it up.
Speaker 1:But see if I could have asked a better question earlier. It would have been, even though no one would have understood me. What are you doing to protect children from the preferential offender? Generally, the response is, I'm sorry, the who from the what Right right, you have no idea what I'm talking about. You're wide open on more than 90% of the problem. So every headline you and I have read 80,000 Boy Scout claims. None of those 80,000 Scouts were abducted, preferential offender or peer sexual abuse. So the better question is what do I need to teach you about the preferential offender? To give you eyes to see, which leads to a mouth that speaks. That's the magic.
Speaker 2:Right, right and preferential offender. Tell us what that is. I'm assuming that's people that you know, we know it's the maybe the kids ministry worker, or it's the maybe the kids ministry worker, or it's the parent volunteer, or it's the uncle or the grandma Like. It's somebody you know inside that is a known person, the kids know them and they're maybe even known by the church, kind of thing. But that's where the 90 percent of the danger is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, first of all, what it's not. It's not the stranger wearing the trench coat with the beanie babies okay, it's typically somebody here's definitionally preferential offender Could be male or female, someone with an age-appropriate adult willing to have sex with them but prefers a child as a sexual partner. It's what we call a deviant sexual desire. You prefer a child as a sexual partner okay, and it's not just any child, it's usually a child within an age and sex of preference. So there's some narrowness to the deviance. Case in point go to Penn State Jerry Sandusky, preferential offender. He wasn't abducting anyone. He was grooming children for abuse because he had an age and sex of preference for boys ages 9 to 14.
Speaker 1:Larry Nassar of USA Gymnastics no visual profile would have told you he was dangerous. He had a pastor background check but he was a preferential offender, though he was married and had an age-appropriate adult willing to have sex with him. He preferred girls ages 10 to 15. It's messed up. No visual profile will help us identify that problem. And that's the big, big, big idea. Frank, you can't recognize this risk visually. We must understand this risk behaviorally and those behaviors are called the grooming process. So, answering one of your questions earlier, what's the magic in the training is teaching people first, undoing a lot of these things we're rolling with. That we think are the right answers. That are not. I've got to make room for good information. First, deconstruct that and then bring the good information, which is your problem is the preferential offender. You can't recognize him visually. You must understand him or her behaviorally, and the behaviors are called the grooming process. And there we go, and here it is yeah.
Speaker 2:So your training, uh, I mean what? Like talk to us about you, like you go around the country educating people all over the place. That's one of the things you do, just as a you know it's your passion. It's obviously part of your business, but it's also your passion. So when you go into a uh, a new you know church or denomination, how are you guiding them through some of this training? Where do you start?
Speaker 1:Typically I'm going to have a conversation with somebody who's a decision maker to help them understand this is what the risk is. So they can downstream that to their member churches if it's a hierarchical denomination Baptists, for example, nazarenes oftentimes those have to learn this church by church by church, unless somebody is downstreaming good information to them. But what I'd first like to do is I know what the barriers are, frank, like I've learned 1,800 ways to fail at this and I can't even get a door to open to come do some live training. Unless somebody first understands, are the training worth having? Okay, so part of the communication is exactly what I've already gone through at the denominational and leadership level. It's. Please don't presume you understand this problem correctly and have a solution.
Speaker 2:Right, potentially because there was a crisis, or maybe there was a nearby crisis, like something that you know. Maybe it wasn't them, but it was like someone they knew, or it was another organization that they were close to, or something that sparks it, and so then there sounds like that's when they're a bit more open to listening to you.
Speaker 1:All right. It's like when the Catholic church got into the ditch, like all these Protestants were looking at like, ooh, at least we're not Catholics, are you high? That's the wrong takeaway. It's the exact same grooming process. They just had a different liturgy and form of worship. Okay, so denominations are funny that they'll see something happen in that denomination and believe that the reason why they had a problem is because of our theological distinction, or until it becomes yours, so it's the church, church leaders.
Speaker 1:Humans are really good at hearing about somebody else's crisis and then looking at themselves and finding a way in which to help them understand it's not my crisis until it is.
Speaker 1:Now. We're seeing a lot of change in just the human response to, but we're also seeing, frank, is insurance companies are feeling this Okay, because you see, it used to be. To settle a sexual abuse claim in the 90s was about $250,000 per victim. That number has steadily grown as our culture, which makes up our jurors, get angrier and angrier about the fact that this was allowed to happen in a place that children should have been safe, right. So today actually in 2023, it's up to $2.5 million per victim for an insurance carrier to settle that case. It's $10.3 million per victim if it goes to trial. Wow, okay. So financially the insurance carriers are saying we can't pay that and just increase your premiums a little bit. So all the insurance carriers that write coverage for churches and child serving organizations are essentially saying we are not renewing your coverage unless you do something at your church to make it safer there so that we won't get a claim Right. And interestingly, they're requiring them to use ministry safe.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, so what does the training look like? You obviously go out and do stuff, but you had to do this in a way that scales to thousands of churches, like I don't assume Greg can fly around every single day of his life training every church on the planet. So you've created, you know it started back in you know 07 or so, but now you've built a whole kind of infrastructure to train churches. What does that look like? If a new church comes in and they're like yep, we want to do this, how do they get the training and deliver it to their volunteers?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's much like online giving. Covid was a game changer in terms of the use of technology to accomplish things Right. Even in ministry, it always seems like ministries are 10 years behind everybody else in leveraging technology. But so my wife Kimberly and I we're on five airplanes a week going in certain directions to be able to teach at this seminary or this conference or this denomination or go help this organization. Navigate a ditch, and then COVID hit and shut down most of the travel. Right, navigate a ditch, and then COVID hit and shut down most of the travel. Now we're already an online tech business that's delivering content and make it scalable online, and now we don't get all the people complaining, like in 2007, about their dial up or their bandwidth and things like that. So all of it was prepared to be scale. We just needed the market to start understanding they need it and then start asking for it, and so COVID forced everybody to get a Zoom account, everybody to get some type of form to communicate to their stakeholders electronically, and we were already positioned to do that.
Speaker 2:So pre-COVID probably like you, we were getting, you know, trying to do online meetings and you know you'd spend a certain percentage of those meetings educating the you know church person that we were trying to get with. Like how do you get on a Zoom meeting or a Google Meet or a GoToMeeting, whatever the platform was? Like OK, open your browser, click this link, do this, you know, to get it to work. Like that happened all the time. But COVID hits and like not anymore. Everybody knows how to use Zoom and online tools and is comfortable doing things kind of on camera and on their computer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we used COVID to refilm, with very, very professional crews, the basic sexual abuse awareness training, but that's not the only content that ministry leaders or child-serving organizational leaders need. So we created the peer-to-peer sexual abuse understanding the risk of third-party liability when you let people use your facilities. Understanding background checks, sexual harassment, your facilities understanding background checks, sexual harassment. I mean, there's like 23 separate offerings that we create because there's a lot of organizations that need more than just sexual abuse awareness training. Now, that's the core piece, and we're training about a hundred thousand people online per month right now and just issued our 4 millionth certificate of completion. Okay, there's a golden ticket winner right there.
Speaker 1:They're going to get a mug, all right it's something like that's yeah, no doubt, and so leveraging technology to deliver content has really kept me off airplanes. But it also allows us to live stream certain training, and it's driven typically by the crisis that a particular industry is having. So we did one for an insurance carrier with about 900 people on. It's like it's peer-to-peer sexual abuse to prepare camps across the country, or after Boy Scouts, like when, holy cow, someone's using our facilities and we could wind up in the same ditch. So we'll provide instruction, so we can craft it and customize it. But of the things that we know there's a demand for, we filmed it, produced it and have an online system to be able to deliver that at scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool. What, um, when you're, when churches are going through this uh, you've kind of shared a lot of the crisis moment kicks it off, things like that. But when you get into the training on the behaviors and the pattern matching and the grooming process, where does the light bulb go off for church leaders? Where do they go? Oh, I get it and they fully buy in and get excited about things.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a different light bulb moment depending on who you are, and that's why we've done the training in such a way and some of the workshops that we do are meant to address okay, third of the room is going to light bulb at this issue. 25% of you on this issue, so, but the top light bulb issue typically is it's not the abduction offender, okay, and it's it's that point's like.
Speaker 2:People don't even get it.
Speaker 1:They're like oh, and even saying that's not enough. Right, it's like going, I'll come, I'll say what it's like. No, no, no, no, let's come at it this way. It's like the way we this idea If I don't know you and you look different from me, I presume you are unsafe and I act accordingly. But see, the opposite is true, that if you do look like me and you're on the inside of my community, I presume you are safe. Right, the preferential offender is on the inside. If the preferential offender isn't already on the inside, that's what the preferential offender wants to do is get on the inside. Preferential offender is not going to come up to my door and knock on my door and say, excuse me, I know you don't know me, but is that your little girl out there swinging? She's lovely. Can I take her to my house for just an hour? We'll make cookies. I'll bring her right back. Right, I'm in Texas. What do you think I'm going to do? Right, but see, the preferential offender knows that. So the idea is the preferential offender wants to first win my trust, get on the inside, then the barriers of protection of the child go down.
Speaker 1:So once I've explained that, and now, because this is so ubiquitous. You know, one out of four Americans has been sexually victimized. So when you're talking to people, they're going. Now that circumstance that we had in our family 10 years ago makes sense. You're just providing language to an experience I didn't understand. Light bulb come on and typically there's going to be something they remember. It's like that explains it, right.
Speaker 1:Or I was being groomed. I wasn't sexually abused, but I knew it felt weird and I just couldn't put my finger on what it was. And so the training actually provides language to have people understand experience. So those are generally where you start seeing the light bulbs come on, and even from those people who have been victimized that aren't talking about it, and you start walking through this and it's almost like there it is. That's, that's okay. And now I'm satisfied. I'm not the only one. Right, there was nothing wrong with me. There was not me that was dressed in a certain way, acting a certain way to make that person choose me. Okay, so it's a it's a multifaceted way in which this information is being processed by the hundreds of thousands of people that are that are that are consuming this information every couple of months. Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a. I mean it's incredible what you guys do, what, what like if you're getting with church leaders now and you're into the portion where you're talking about the grooming process, like give us the short version of you know what that process looks like and how church leaders can you know if they're watching this video, if they picked up with a couple of things and want to go learn more, but what's the key points in the grooming process?
Speaker 1:Okay and want to go learn more. But what's the key points in the grooming process? Okay, what I'd want to do first, regardless of who the audience is, is set up the idea that the preferential offender has a deviant sexual desire and age and sex of preference of that deviant sexual desire is going to drive where they seek access, right. So if it's somebody with a deviant sexual desire for five-year-olds, daycares, pre-ks, kindergartens, children's ministries, okay, it narrows. Where we gather those types of children in our culture, the church. We gather them all okay. So our target, regardless of the age and sexual preference, is helping people understand they want to go from the outside to the inside, okay, and what that means of going on the inside at a church is they're going to need a name tag. Okay, whether you're going to pay them or not, staff member or volunteer, they're going to work to go through your process. So that's one of the first challenges to the church how hard is it to get a name tag at your church, and is that different depending on the program? And then what the abuser is going to do is gain access, which is typically grooming the gatekeepers. It's grooming the adult leaders. It's going through anybody the abuser has to go through to gain trusted time alone with the child. Okay, so it's going to be gaining access, then selecting one or more children in such a way that the child is chosen by virtue of how easy is it for the abuser to carve that little one away from the herd into isolation for trusted time alone, where there will be inappropriate touch and talk Along. That way there will be the introduction of nudity and sexual touch through sexual discussion, sexual joking, sexual banter. And now we get the opportunity to get refined, depending on who the audience is, because, see, the grooming process now will take on a different feel if it's a teenage girl versus a teenage boy, or if it's in a youth sport program or an overnight camping.
Speaker 1:This is typically how this unfolds. Okay, so that's when we generally can go as deep as you want if we get the opportunity to get in front of people and refine it. And then ultimately the grooming process kind of has wrapped into the whole situation of keeping the victim quiet. Shame, embarrassment, threat Number one, reason why a sexual abuse victim won't tell you. No one will believe me, right? Sadly, most of the times we don't, Right? Okay, so this instruction also tries to untake that stinger out so that the grooming process can be unpacked where people can see it, but also give courage for those people to say something with an audience that will receive it. Right, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what? What about the impact? Like you guys have been at this you said 25 years you know you've trained thousands, millions of people, thousands of churches, like what kind of impact have you seen over the course of 25 years?
Speaker 1:That used to be a difficult question to answer, when people would ask with an attitude of well, can you prove it works?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I feel like I know you've had an impact. I want to hear the stories of like where you've seen you know.
Speaker 1:Here's what here's. We got two things that just happened today. All right, we get a feedback from an educator, and educators are hard because they're beginning sexual abuse trainings for years and years and years. And here's an educator actually out of San Lorenzo, california. The ministry safe course was outstanding. I've been a Christian school teacher for 45 years and seen a lot of videos and trainings on this topic, but this was one of the best I've seen Clear, informative, authoritative, efficiently and effectively communicated. Thank you for putting it together and make it easy to access. Getting compliments like that from my educators is pretty huge.
Speaker 1:But there's also something that happened even this weekend in the Southern Baptist Convention. They voted for and got a new president okay, and he pastors a church in North Carolina and that church has had a challenge recently involving a student ministry volunteer, and this was actually came out in that Baptist publication. This is regarding sexual abuse reform. Freshly spoke on his church recently reporting a case involving a student ministry volunteer, and he goes on to say the SBC is much further down the road than we've ever been. He said on the convention's steps toward abuse In 2018, we weren't even talking about abuse.
Speaker 1:Hickory Grove's use of Ministry Safe prepared volunteers for the situation no church wants to face. We knew what to do, and so, when the crisis hit, our people responded, said Presley, it's like I've never met the man, but it's an encouragement and we hear those types of things all the time that we're not blindsided anymore. You've given us the language, you've given us eyes to see, which leads to a mouth that speaks, not only to prevent it, but in the God forbid a circumstance that does unfold, we can at least start to navigate it well, so that we don't compound the crisis, re-victimize victims and some of the things that all the social media says that we're bad at, which most of the times they're right.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, no, I love that. Those are cool. Man, it's awesome what you guys are doing. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Where should folks go to learn more about Ministry Safe and sign up for the trainings, if they're not already taking them?
Speaker 1:Yep, ministrysafecom, and it's all very, very intuitive. Yeah, you can download information, you can preview things. You can call one of my staff members. They'll find them extremely generous. Whether you're a cowboy church out in the sticks or whether you're a mega church with multiple campuses, you know we're easy to find access to content. It's easy to get. And just hear me say if you're one of those churches that really says I can't afford it, okay, and if I believe you and I remember people lie to me for a living, I'll give it to you. I don't want ever there to be money being a reason why we can't be able to protect our children from sexual abuse.
Speaker 2:I'll pay for it.
Speaker 1:Frank, I know you're going to be right behind me and you'll pay for it right after me.
Speaker 2:Amen, a hundred percent. That's so good. Ministrysafecom Guys go check it out. Greg, thanks for coming on the show, appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Frank.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thanks guys, Definitely spread the.