Nothing is more important than the safety of our children, right? Consider then checking your membership data against your states sex offender database. Even if you require background checks for volunteers who serve around children, you want to compare everyone in your database. It’s cheap (the AZ database is only $25) and fairly easy to do with some minor tech skills.

So what do you do with the results? We flag the records in Arena (set a note that displays largely at the top of the record), add a photo to Arena (if one already exists we leave it otherwise we add their ‘mugshot’) and ensure our security team is aware of their presence.

These individuals are as welcome as any other person in our church, God loves them as much as me. But, the safety of our children demand that we take extra precautions.

For information on getting the database for your state see the Department of Justice website. Arizona churches see the DPS website.

Update: A few people have asked for tips on doing the compare. Here’s what we did. We started by importing the file into a SQL table and then looked for matches on last name, zip code and the first letter of the first name. This produces some false positives, but we quickly ruled those out but looking at their full first name and addresses.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Arena, General Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.