This article tells the story of initiatives of the Instruments of Communion to enhance the safety of all persons within the Anglican Communion over the past three decades. These Initiatives have taken place against the backdrop of the significant evidence that has come to light in recent years of abuse being perpetrated by clergy and lay leaders against children, young people and vulnerable adults in the provinces. It describes the actions of the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the work of the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission.

The process of creating a Safe and Inclusive Church (SIC) Commission within the Anglican Church of the Province of SouthernAfrica (ACSA) is not unique in the Communion. This article seeks to explore ACSA’s specific journey to date, with a view to engaging the Communion in a learning partnership. While some of the process of establishing this ministry may be unique, there are places of commonality as we jointly grapple with the call of our Lord Jesus to continue to build the Kingdom of God in contemporary times. Most specifically, this process has highlighted a need for renewal of the Church in both our theological understanding and how we organize to best serve our call to preach the Good News. These theological and structural dimensions of ‘doing church’ speak deeply into our ‘being church’ and are at the heart of why dialogue is needed as a Communion. We offer this article as an invitation to continue discerning together how best to follow and serve our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by being His Body to a broken and wounded world.

This article examines the contribution of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to the ecclesiology of the Anglican Church of Australia (ACA). The focus is on diocesanism – the strong form of diocesan autonomy that exists in the ACA. The article concludes that the Royal Commission identified diocesanism and the associated dispersion of ecclesial authority as key factors constraining the ACA’s responses to child sexual abuse, and actively sought to modify its impact. The article also points to the significance of the Royal Commission’s findings to ACA ecclesiological understandings and change.

This essay will examine the contribution of pastoral (professional) supervision in enabling and ensuring a safe church. Pastoral supervision is the brave, safe space where clergy (and ministry workers) reflect on their ministry practice in a regular, planned supervision session. The present article emerges from a decade of training pastoral supervisors and consultation across the national Anglican Church during 2019 based on recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It concludes that the properly Christian way for pastoral supervision to change the culture of the Church is christological: a rigorous grounding of its theory and practice in the story of Jesus Christ.

This article concerns child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church of Australia and the Church of England and, in particular, an integrity system to combat this problem and the ethical problems it gives rise to. The article relies on the findings of various commissions of inquiry to determine the nature and extent of child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church. The two salient ethical problems identified are: (1) design of safety measures in the light of the statistical preponderance of male on male sexuality; (2) justice issues arising from redress schemes established or proposed to provide redress to victims.