How to Identify & Stop Predators in the Church

Julie: It is something I call Wack-a-Wolf and is a far too common practice in the church. A pastor is fired for sexual or financial misconduct at one church. Only to pop up later at another church. There he’s able to pray once again on unsuspecting congregants till he is fired and then repeats the process.

But what if there was a way to stop Wack-a-Wolf? And what if victims of clergy sex abuse and whistleblowers had a safe and effective way to report misconduct? My guests today say they have a solution and it isn’t even that complicated. Welcome to the Roys report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church.

I’m Julie Roys, and joining me today are John Horwood and Ian Meyer, directors of Digital Alibi. This is a comprehensive accountability framework that protects both organizations and their leaders. And it does this by providing secure reporting as well as proactive accountability management. We’ll get into the details of that in just a moment.

But first, I’d like to introduce you to John Horwood, who has decades of experience in the financial world. He also is one of the founding investment advisors of Richardson Wealth, the leading private wealth management firm in Canada. So John, welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you join me.

John Horwood: Thank you. Julie, certainly, it is an honor to be here.

Julie: Also joining me is Ian Meyer, an innovative entrepreneur from the UK whose expertise focuses on equipping leaders to transform organizations. He is a managing director of two companies, evolving people, and Marata Limited. And Ian, I am thrilled to have you join us today. So welcome.

Ian Mayer: My pleasure, Julie.

Really looking forward to a great discussion on a good topic.

Julie: Yes, me as well. And I was so glad to hear about Digital alibi and all that you’re doing with it because I think this is a very needed tool in the church and we need to stop some of what’s been happening. As I mentioned in the open, there are some key safeguarding issues within the church, and one of those is just reporting abuse or misconduct because usually in these situations.

The person reporting is often the victim of abuse who often has very little power, very little clout, and the person they’re reporting on has a lot of clout and a lot of power. Or the same with a whistleblower who sees maybe financial misconduct. John, let me start with you. How is it that someone with a financial background ended up becoming involved in church safeguarding,

John Horwood: Bo, Ian and I have always had a foot in both camps. So we have a, our right foot is in our church, in our Christian value system. But the other side of it is that we’re in the marketplace and we’re trying to represent our face and our belief system in the marketplace. And it starts off as a desire to share their marketplace principles.

But quite often, the osmosis works in reverse. Sometimes you see stuff in the marketplace that is desperately needed in the church. And that’s what happened in this case. Over 20 years, we were able to build a very strong wealth management to organization, which was largely free from these kind of issues.

And wealth management is fraught. It’s very litigious. You’re dealing with often. You’re dealing with people’s life savings often millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. So it attracts some very bad actors. And you need some very sophisticated technology prestigious and compliance to deal with them, firstly, to make sure they don’t get into the firm.

And secondly to get them out if there’s any kind of trouble. So most of these technologies and ideas we developed over 20 years that cost. Literally tens of millions of dollars have adaptability very quickly into a church environment. So that’s how we ended up with a foot in both camps, and that’s how we were able to adapt world class business technology for use in the church and hopefully dramatically reduce abuse.

Julie: And I remember the first time I talked with you, you called and you just reached out and said, I have a program that could solve a lot of the problems that you’re seeing. And I remember in that first conversation just being impressed with how far ahead the safeguarding is in the financial industry than it is in the church.

Again, is this just a matter of there’s more resources and funds, or why is it that we haven’t really had this kind of safeguarding things in place in the church? Where we do in other industries?

John Horwood: Part of it is litigation. The last thing wealth management companies want is serious lawsuits and also are being tried in the court of public opinion which happens more and more now.

And so we really didn’t have any choice. If you want to survive in that environment, you better be squeaky clean. And sadly in the church, in the Christian world, that’s, that simply isn’t the case. We’ve been, just been polling along. I think the church is probably where the wealth management industry was 20 years ago.

There’s lots and lots of policies, procedures, but nobody’s got to the compliance part. How do you force those policies and procedures? How do you make them happen? How do you check up on people to keep them honest? That’s the piece that’s missing and that’s the piece that you’re gonna see with Digital Alibi,

Julie: and that’s what makes me excited about this program because.

When you’re just relying on people out of the goodness of their heart to do things. And you would hope that it would be the case in the church that when that happens, people would do it. But church is made of sinners too. We really need this piece. Ian. We haven’t really spoken before, but my guess is you have some personal context as well with the church and also with the, the business world.

Ian Mayer: Absolutely. Like John, I’ve got a foot in both camps in the my wife and I have been involved in ministry for decades and been involved in church leadership and we have seen these problems firsthand. We’ve experienced these problems within churches. And I think like John, I’ve just come to the conclusion of why is this sent back?

If the church should do anything, it should be leading the field. In all areas of life really. We should be the best of the best, really. And I, from a technology point of view, when we first started back in the late nineties our vision when we started the technology company was to be open with technology, open with privacy, open with design open.

In, and we, a lot of the stuff we do is open source. Our frameworks are all based on open source. We’re non-proprietary and we wanted to I think one of our strap lines is technology that connects. We wanted to connect people. We wanted to make the world better. Bear in mind it’s the late nineties, we’re headed into early 2000, and you’ve got the whole.

Whole discussion about what is the internet, where is it going and stuff. And I think at that moment we saw the power of collaboration and of being able to use technology for good, really. So yeah, this ticks a lot of boxes for us. And our friendship with John over the years has meant that. We’ve had a perfect storm, if I can use that expression and where we are today.

When you look at the website, you look at the tools, the audits because this is a package, this isn’t a sort of a thing that you download and it solves your problems. This is a package. The framework that wraps around an organization and all that stuff has been, what, 18 months showing the making probably.

So we’ve been really agile in the way we’ve managed to be able to get the, get this out there

John Horwood: 18 months in the making, but 30

Ian Mayer: years in terms of experience. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think on the team page, which we updated today, we’ve got a new team member who’s joined us, Dr. Libby Ashurst, who’s a clinical psychologist, and.

She’s, yeah, I think would, we said well over a hundred years of experience, John, probably 150 now yeah. So there we go.

Julie: Wait, she has over 150 years of experience.

Ian Mayer: No, we, it was a scene. Yeah. She wouldn’t like me to say that. You might wanna edit that but out. Yeah.

Julie: Let’s dig into digital alibi and what’s in it.

I mentioned a couple of safeguarding issues right at the top that, that I’ve seen over and over in my reporting. And one is just when somebody is either abused by a clergy member or is a whistleblower and sees misconduct happening. When they go to report it, the person who’s seen it or the victim usually has very little power and they’re usually reporting on somebody that has a lot of power.

And so it’s very scary to do. How does Digital Alibi solve this problem, again, of this power imbalance and reporting something that maybe an organization doesn’t wanna hear or deal with?

Ian Mayer: So the idea behind this, Julie, is that. The current situation, I dunno what it’s like in your churches, but in many churches around here, the disclosure process is basically a poster at the back of church that says Your safeguarding lead is Joe Blogs and a mobile number and an email address, safeguarding app, the church dot.

Julie: That actually is more than we have in the church. I’ve never, I have never seen a poster. I’ve never seen, I’ve seen one website on a church site that says something, but honestly, I’ve never seen that in a church.

Ian Mayer: No. In the Church of England, you’ll see that now all over because of the present, a present and historical difficulties within the Anglican Church within the UK.

So you see that now all over. But within non-denominational churches, within free churches, you rarely see any such a recognition of, what do I do if I have a problem? What is the process? So the idea behind the CDS, the confidential disclosure service is it’s part of the ecosystem that allows anybody to raise a concern really easily.

And they’re not raising, they’re raising the concern to the organizational leadership, but there’s, I think the best way to describe it is there’s someone else in the room, digital alibi is in the room, so it’s on our system. And once that disclosure’s been raised, and it could be as simple as it could be a query about something that just doesn’t feel right or it could be really serious and we’ve got lots of guidelines about how to.

How to make disclosures and how we support people who are making the disclosures and what our role is. All that is answered on our website, but I think fundamentally it’s about making it easier for somebody to make a concern with the knowledge that concern won’t be shelved, it won’t disappear.

There’s somebody else standing alongside it, watching to see what happens when that concern is raised. And unless that concern is dealt with to the satisfaction of, I wouldn’t say digital alibi, but I would say to the satisfaction of what we would call genuine standard, that we could all be assured actually that concern was dealt with.

Unless that happens, it will stay on our system. And it’s really interesting because what we’re piloting in the UK and trying to do, we’re getting more traction in Canada at the moment. But we’ve done some pilot stuff in the UK and I talked to church leaders and one church leader said to me, oh, does this make it easier for people to raise concerns?

And you could see the answer is, I only said. Yes. Is that a problem? And you could see the color drained away from his face and then he realized, he saw almost the line went on. Nothing. No, it isn’t a problem. No, it shouldn’t be. Should it? But you could see he was predisposed and culturally such an embedded in people could say anything.

Yeah. Actually so yeah, it does, I think the best way to see how it, we’ve got some, a really good walkthrough on the website of how this works, our obligations to the organization’s obligations. But most of all the supports and obligations to the disclosure, because we’re about accountability and accountability flows two ways.

That’s the problem in the church. I don’t wanna be negative or let’s just be realistic. Accountability doesn’t always flow both ways.

Julie: It doesn’t and this brings up the issue, which I’ve done tons of reporting on where it might even be a minor who’s reporting and they’re the victim of clergy sexual abuse.

And I can’t tell you how many times I have. Reported a story where that minor or when they’re older, which is often the case because the, I think the average age that someone who’s abused when their child talks about it is 52, which is sad. But I think, yeah, I think part of it is, part of it is having no way to report, not knowing how to report, but part of it is too.

They’re conditioned, like you said to almost think it’s gossip or slander. I should never say something against a spiritual authority. If I do, I’m going to hell. These sorts of things. But these are crimes. These are crimes, and so often they do go to somebody in the church and this never gets reported to police, and by the time I’m reporting on it, it’s outside the statute of limitations and it can’t.

The law can’t do anything about it. So how does digital alibi, how does it help in a case where you’ve got a criminal a criminal type of misconduct that somebody’s reporting, what happens there?

Ian Mayer: We make it clear on the website. We are not the investigator and we are not the police. But if this is criminal then we will shine the light on it.

The organization has the chance to do that first. Within a very short timescale. Unless that happens, we will shine the light on it.

Julie: And by shine the light, you mean report to law enforcement?

Ian Mayer: We mean in for, yeah. Yeah. Depending on the territorial, laws. Because at the moment we’re dealing with Canada.

In the UK we would be, I think, similar. There’s clearly things that are illegal. There are clearly, and there are clearly things that aren’t so it’s a really easy ask to say actually that is illegal, that is unlawful. So we’ve got some really good FAQs that really drill down into this and give a bit of advice as well over what people should do, particularly if they’re in a coercive situation where they feel they can’t do anything.

I think going on the website would actually help them. Read through some of the scenarios that, that they can take control. So yeah, this is it’s almost like having a friend, isn’t it an independent friend who is gonna say, yeah we, you’re telling us as well. And it won’t go, it won’t go away.

Julie: And when they report, does the church have to find out, or, I guess obviously you want to let them know there’s a report. Is the identity of the person reporting, is that kept confidential?

Ian Mayer: It is, yeah. So the person reveals their identity to us. The church then gets an email, send a disclosure’s, been made, the church logs into our disclosure portal and can see the disclosure.

The church can only, and we say church, but actually it could be a community group, it could be a small business, it could be any entity. They only see what the disclosure. Wants them to see. So if they want to restrict information and their identity, the church will not see that. And we make it clear on which bits the church sees and which bits the church doesn’t see.

So that they feel co absolutely confident. And we cover that in some of the FAQs as well.

Julie: And that’s critically important because in so many of the cases I report even. Even the details of the offense sometimes will reveal the identity of the person reporting. So they often don’t even want that disclosed.

Ian Mayer: No. So we wouldn’t disclose that. Notwithstanding a call to, or some law enforcement request. But we would not disclose it no matter how vociferous an organization was or how many lawyers they had. We wouldn’t because we pledge not to. So that would, but we would obviously within the law we are then approached by law enforcement.

You would, it goes into the due process, doesn’t it, at that point. But yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that’s part of the issue, that there’s two things. There’s the ease at which you can disclose something which isn’t very easy at the moment. And the reassurance that there won’t be repercussions, that your life won’t blow up.

After this, because you are almost telling a friend and that friend is going to do this for you. But obviously we’re using technology to make that easier. I have to say behind the technology is our team. So we’ve got a great team. There’s only a dozen of us, but we, we know what we’re doing and we are a team of, of people of faith and we understand the issues and some of us have been affected by those issues deeply. So we know, this is we’re not just wrapping some tech around here. This is tech and people really yeah. Yeah.

John Horwood: Can I just add something to Ian’s comment? The the design of this sort of, if you like, the back end.

Part of it was really not only for for abuse of minus, it was designed to cover the other plethora of problems in my experience with the church, I’ve had a half a dozen personal engagements and none of them were the traditional pastoral abuse cases. There was family abuse, there was elder abuse and financial.

Pieces that went on in the church, and this was designed to be a catchall for all of them. An interesting analogy, an interesting industry analogy is you were mentioning there was nothing in American churches in the wealth management business in Canada. When you walk into the office prominently displayed on the front counter is a brochure explaining that if you have any issues.

Then you have to contact a third party independent person. And the brochure contains all of the information on what the report, how the report is, and how it’s going on. And that was the basis of our disclosure in digital.

Julie: So if a church signs up. For digital alibi, is that a requirement that they have some way of informing their congregation?

Ian Mayer: It is, yeah, because the framework is extensive. We’ve got, lots of different tools, new tools come in on stream all the time. But that is one of the key framework, one of the key tools that needs, when they do the getting started and they’re onboarded, they’re making a commitment to to implement that.

Because really that’s the start. If they don’t go any further, I guess at least we’ve done some of the job. We’ve made a big inroad into the into this issue. We want them to go further. We want them to use the save by location or the digital by app with leaders.

We want them to do the audits. But if they don’t, then actually we’ve done a big thing by getting them to do that. Yeah.

John Horwood: Can I just say, Julie we’ve started at the back door of the church, IE problems. When we look at the front door, I think we will have eliminated probably nine outta 10 of the problems before they even get into the front door of the church.

Julie: And one of the issues that I brought up at the beginning too is, Wack-a-Wolf, I say, based on the game, Whack-a-Mole or whatever but we do, we have these wolves in sheep’s clothing coming into the churches. It’s becoming more and more common. Again, they get caught at one church, hardly ever gets reported to the police.

So they go on and they go to another church and they re-offend and it’s happening over and over again. In fact. We found with what was happening within the Southern Baptist Convention, they found that there was a list, a database with 700 names of volunteers and staff clergy who had sexual offenses in their background, and even then the churches didn’t get ’em.

So what does Digital alibi do? That prevents this kind of moving from one church to another, and these predator pastors getting more and more exposure to unsuspecting congregants.

Ian Mayer: Yeah, one of the big problems, and it’s the same in the UK, is unless you’ve been caught or you had a, negative CRB or a DBS check.

Then you’re not gonna flag up on any list because what we do is we do A CRB or A-A-A-D-B-S check, and then that’s it. So one of the things that alibi encourages is advanced screening. So anybody coming in or being appointed, particularly if they’re gonna be a person of influence, they’re gonna have control over others.

They’re gonna be in leadership. We have got a process where churches would go through an adv advance screening and that advent screening, we’re not saying don’t do DBS and CRB, they should do that as well. But the advent,

Julie: what? We don’t have those acronyms. DB, s and CRB, they, I think they

Ian Mayer: would be called, they’d be called police checks.

John a Nobel police, a CRI criminal record check.

John Horwood: Yes.

Ian Mayer: In Canada

John Horwood: is a police check. You’re obligated to do.

Julie: Background check.

Ian Mayer: Yeah. I don’t know if in the state, whether it states, whether you have a police check to see if somebody’s been committed a crime or,

Julie: and it is the same here where in fact I reported a story recently where a pastor had numerous allegations against him, actually had charges against him, but it didn’t come up on the background check because there was no conviction.

So it never came up, even though there was clearly a pattern.

Ian Mayer: Yes, same here. Exactly. And that is similar to our, throughout the world actually. That’s about to change because what we’re suggesting and the framework, the advan screening platform we’ve called it because it’s a way of going through a process of screening that is logical, that you can then store that information.

You can go to various providers. And it actually highlights for the church, particularly in pre-appointment, if they’re appointing somebody or even people who are already existing and on the payroll, they go through the set process and they access all the databases, not just CRB, and they’re not just doing a DBS check, but they access as well.

We’ve got some online tools to work out, for example social media reputation things like news reporting. So all this sort of stuff is done in financial services. We do it in technology. We don’t let people work for us if they’ve got adverse news reports. So one of the parts of the platform is getting churches into that mindset where they do this proper adv advance screen and they go out and look for this stuff because it’s out there.

Actually we’ve done a few test checks on known, offenders in the church. Those who are either by rumor or by results have been identified as problematic. We’ve used a few different databases and they come up with adverse results, so they would be caught, they would be caught. So that, as John says, it’s about the front door that’s stopping, actually trying to stop the WS before we even, they even pop up before they even get in till the real light.

Julie: So important. And that’s part of the reason we report stories. People are like why are you reporting on every pastor that gets, charged or sentenced or whatever? And I’m like, because I wanna make sure when that pastor goes to the next church and they do a Google search that this comes up.

That’s super important to me.

Ian Mayer: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And actually you are part of our advanced screening platform by, you will be by accident because anything you put on Twitter, anything you put out there will come up. Oh really? And yeah, there’ll be false positives, but so what that is, that’s what happens.

But you at least a church will lock and actually say, hang on a minute. We’ll just click through to this. Let’s have a read of this. Let’s just be, make an informed choice. You know about, about that person, that appointment. Yeah, the advanced screening platform is working with commercial databases, we call them.

In the UK they’d be called politically exposed persons as well. Or a ML anti-money laundering checks. All the stuff you would do in financial services or in technology or in banking. We are bringing those databases ’cause they’re all open. These databases, they’re all open. We’re bringing them into a platform that makes it easier for churches to say, oh yeah, I’m gonna go through this.

I’m gonna check this person out. And yeah, I can hear people screaming in the background about privacy. You know what, if I can hear right, but I’m afraid, I, my reply is, privacy is the enemy of accountability. And I’m sorry if that’s offensive in some democracies across the world, but actually we need to, particularly as Christians, in accountability and privacy.

Do you know as Christians and people of faith, we believe that God knows everything anyway, don’t we? Yeah, whatever you’re trying to hide you, you’re on a loser, so don’t bother. So yeah, I think pastors, ministers, people in leadership should have the maturity to to understand really what privacy is.

For me, privacy is if I want time with my wife away from work in a restaurant without being disturbed. That’s privacy. It’s not locking away certain things I do so that other people don’t know about them. That’s not privacy. Yeah I just have a bit of a beam up on it about this

Julie: sec. So do I, because of what I’ve seen what I see a lot of here in the states.

Is people thinking that if they do have a safeguarding policy or some sort of process, then maybe, hey, our church has done a conference on this, or we’ve done workshops on this, that they’re safe or, and on the financial end, if they’re members of the Evangel Evangelical Counsel for Financial Accountability or ECFA, that, then it’s all good.

You know this church is a member of ECFA. They’ve gotta be doing. Doing well. Why are those things not enough?

Ian Mayer: I think they’re not enough for the same reason. As, people with driving licenses still drive when they’re intoxicated. You’ve got a driving license, you do all the, you’ve got, you’ve service your car, you’re doing all the paperwork, but actually people still go rogue.

And this is what it’s about really. It’s about who do you my vehicle has a speed warning. That was, I’ve switched on. You could switch it off if you want, but I find it really useful to know if I’m in an urban area that I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be stopped till the ticket tick if I’m going over 30 miles an hour.

And you can tell that’s a bit of an, that’s a bit of an imposition. Is it on my vehicle. But actually it’s those it’s, there’s an analogy there about how we need to, as well put in place real things that, that, that stop this. It stops the wall of shield, doesn’t it really?

We are not, we’re not able to we have never said we can do this completely.

That’s, that needs to be on record, but we’re gonna make it really difficult for bad actors to continue to operate

John Horwood: policies and procedures. Keep the good guys good. I guess that’s the best way, but it’s the equivalent of having a legal system without a police force. So digital alibi represents the police force.

It’s if if you go off the rails someone’s going to, someone’s gonna notice and someone’s gonna take action to to deal with the issue and to fix it as fast as possible. We sincerely believe with the front end that we’ll be able to avoid. Nine outta 10 of the bad actors showing up at the front door and and engaging with the church and the Christian organization.

But the other tools we’ve got are going to make sure that if they are in there if there are any problems, they’re gonna show up quickly and they’ll be able to doubt, be able to dealt with properly and effectively.

Julie: That’s a really good way of putting it as having, laws without a law enforcement system because.

And I’ve said this numerous times. ECFA has these seven standards that are pretty good standards. Some of them I’ve said in the past, I think are a little weak. For example, you can have up to half of your board be not independent. Meaning they could be family members, they can be employees, so they’re not, they’re under the control of whoever the top person is, their boss or if they’re, blood related to the CEO, same sort of thing, but there’s no way of enforcing. And in fact, when I was reporting on Harvest Bible Chapel, I called the ECFA and said, Hey, I’m told by the former CFO that there’s a black budget that nobody knows what’s in the black budget, that elders are given pie charts of the budget.

They don’t know how much the pastor makes, even the people on the elder board, this seems to be a problem. They came in, did a half a day at Harvest and said, it’s all good. They’re a member in good standing. Later it came out that everything we were reporting was, and that, it was true. And they did a real financial review there that said that there was gross mismanagement and that, there were private accounts that the pastor was using to fund all sorts of private things.

But again, none of that came out, even when we called ECFA and said there’s a problem. I just haven’t seen that there’s any teeth and these bad organizations. In fact, every bad organization that’s lost their membership in the ECFA has lost it because journalists have reported something. Then they do something when there’s public exposure, then they do something.

But before that, not. It’s just a huge problem. What do you require, and I know a lot of your system, which is critically important, is focused on bad actors who and they can be involved in financial misconduct, but do you do anything requiring the church to disclose, for example, the salaries to disclose how they’re spending the money?

A, anything along those lines?

Ian Mayer: No, we haven’t. We haven’t. But we could. We, Julie, I have to say, we’ve got more tools than ideas than we’ve got time. We have got because it’s a framework where we’re, and it all the technology’s open stuff that we use and we can bolt new things on. The confidential disclosure service came out because it was an idea.

We didn’t start with that actually. We started with the mobile tracking app for leaders. Because we were concerned that we, PE people didn’t know where these leaders were at any one time and what they were doing. And we were like that’s a problem straight away, isn’t it? You dunno where your leader is or what your leader’s doing, so let’s solve that.

But the confidential disclosure service came out. I have to say, to be honest, by accident, and yet it’s one of the key pillars to, to what we do. But yeah, there are other things that we are bringing. We’re halfway through developing a policy management tool. Because the problem, as John’s just said about policies, is they just sit in a filing cabinet somewhere, they’re downloaded.

What we want to do is we wanna make sure they’re up to date, they’re downloaded by the right people, they’re stored in a central area, they’re actively managed, basically. So we’re, we are creating a policy management tool as part of the system where you could manage other policies, actually, HR or whatever.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think in some territories it’s more important than others. In the UK the Charity Commission, if it’s a registered charity the charity Commission does have not got many teeth, but it’s got, it can give you a nasty bite. And it, it also, you can download accounts.

You can see who’s a trustee of the, we’ve got quite a good system in the UK. I understand that perhaps in the states that’s not quite the same. I dunno whether it’s the same in Australia, whether there’s some churches are hidden behind a sort of is it a charitable sort of status? In the UK they’re not.

John Horwood: I was gonna say in Canada, I wouldn’t say it’s clean, but the the taxation authorities, the CRA have demand of fairly high level of reporting, which is public.

Julie: Yeah I actually think it’s probably worse in the US than probably about anywhere. And I think the reason for that is I it’s a good reason.

It’s that Americans are, we like our independence and we especially do not want the government telling the church what to do. And I think all of us as Christians are like, yeah, we don’t want this state being involved in regulating the church. At the same time, it’s created a huge problem where. Every single nonprofit, every secular nonprofit in the United States has to report a nine 90, which has all sorts of disclosures, including the salaries of the top wage earners.

But in the United States, a church or a Christian nonprofit, a faith-based nonprofit, all they have to do is re-register. All they really have to do is make an argument that they’re an association of churches, which is a joke. The organizations that have done this. They do. They say our board is, our EL is like our elder board.

And when we meet for staff devotions, that’s like our church service. And that’s what focus on the family did and opted out of being, having to file nine nineties. Now when it became public, we reported on it and other organizations did as well, and then they started voluntarily submitting nine nineties and posting them, which is great.

The majority of organizations and churches don’t do that. So we really have a problem here in the us

Ian Mayer: Yeah. But it’s a key issue and I think it would be good to work with you, Julie, on some solution that would

John Horwood: shine the light on it. I was quite shocked until I started reading your blog and your reports, Julie, on just how, you know how messy it is in the US and I think probably a big part of it is that there is.

Enormous amount of money involved.

Julie: Yeah, absolutely. When the founding fathers created the United States, I don’t think any of them had in mind that there might be megachurches with literally tens of millions of dollars that there handling. And there is no oversight whatsoever.

It’s absolutely crazy.

Ian Mayer: And private jets, I believe. Yeah.

Julie: Oh, all sorts of things. Yeah. Mansions, multiple mansions. We just had a case here. Of a pastor David Taylor, who literally had a slave operation going on where people were forced to raise money for him, and if they didn’t, then they were punished.

And here he had multiple mansions, multiple cars. The whole thing. I just, it’s just absolutely terrible.

Ian Mayer: So yeah, it’s an area we need to look at. If the States is a good marketplace for that, then we could explore that. Yeah. Thankfully in the UK it’s not, yeah. It would be difficult for a UK church to have a private jet.

John Horwood: So when I started going down this road probably about 20 years ago, trying to figure it out I watched a lot of American TV evangelists to just figure out how far they were pushing it. And there’s one whose name we probably shouldn’t mention, but, during every broadcast he had his model of the plane on his desk so that everybody could see that, cl quite clearly what the goal was that he really needed to have this plane so that he could do the Lord’s work. And it’s just I don’t know, made me feel sick.

Julie: It’s terrible. It is terrible. And yeah,

Ian Mayer: no good. No good. So yeah, it, so answer your question, Julie definitely a digital by spinoff.

Yeah.

Julie: You had mentioned this briefly, but I think it’d be easy to miss. You actually have a tracking system for key leaders that you’re asking them to voluntarily sign up for. Talk about that a little bit and what the impetus is behind that.

Ian Mayer: Yeah there are two, actually. There’s one called the save by location, which is a very low key ideal for say, street pastors, where they’re going from place to place and they need to prove presence, proof of presence for stewards or for.

For anybody who’s out and about, that’s a really low touch. It’s called SML, the save my Location app. And then there’s the Digital Alibi app, the EAA, which install as a resident app only available on Android at the moment due to finance. But we proved the con, in fact, mine is switched on at the moment.

We proved it works and it’s a simple application where you switch it on and it basically just tracks you. Every 15 minutes and reports that to a central place. And it, there’s a nice little map of where you’ve been at the moment. The second version would include context. So you’d be able to add voice notes or images or documents sort at the moment, you can’t do that.

You can do that with the Save My Location app, which is quite useful. So you could take a picture of something, upload it, and it will also record you. Location map. So it’s about saving activity along with context to add. I think it keeps it in the mind, so that leaders are not feeling but actually it will make them aware.

And I think if they’re a bad actor, it would’ve, it’s gonna they’re gonna move, aren’t they? They’re gonna lie. I dunno, they’re gonna give up and get another job.

John Horwood: Yeah. The bad actor isn’t gonna subject themselves to that kind of rigorous examination and certainly 30 years of experience in wealth management.

The thing that save me a number of times from litigation was the fact that any of my recommendations were made in writing and by email. And secondly, I kept notes. Sometimes very short cursive notes of every conversation, but that’s saved that’s saved by Bacon quite a few times when you had the Me Too type people or people come along after the fact and say, you, he said, she said, and my mother-in-law who you know, who passed away 20 years ago, told you to do this and you didn’t do it, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That sort of thing. I was able to. To maintain a clean track record and a clean reputation over three years just by basic documentation.

Ian Mayer: And this makes it easy. You, I’ve got mindset to always track, but you can set that for Monday, Tuesday, Monday through to Sunday, different times. And it’s a cool, it’s a cool application that reports back to.

Whoever you wanted to report back to somebody on your team or an accountability partner. So yeah. Probably more invasive than some churches would like, but there we go.

Julie: And you’ve spoken to this about church leaders who, might have some reservation about why should I subject myself to this kind of accountability?

But what about the congregants who. They want this. I don’t know of a congregation that wouldn’t want this. Like we want this kind of accountability for those folks who are listening who are like, yeah, I want my church to do that. What can they do to impress upon their leadership that this is something we want, if you want us to give our money.

You, you need to give us this kind of accountability.

Ian Mayer: Yeah. I think that type of pressure, Julie, would go a long way really, so they can go on our website, they can read our blogs. Our blogs are fair. We don’t idea, we don’t identify names or organizations. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out who we’re talking about.

They can post on social media. We’ve got a great social media presence and they can, it would be great. A lot of leaders are sharing this stuff, which is great in the UK here where leaders are in our network. But actually to get people just off, just Christians who say, this is great.

We want my church to have this just talk about it. Send it to your leader. It’s not cost prohibitive at all. Particularly for smaller churches, we geared it. So it’s not based on the size of the church, it’s based on the number of people you think might be. At risk. So if you are a small church with one leader then you know it is 15 pounds 30 Canadian dollars a month, it’s and you get everything.

What we haven’t done is we haven’t made it or if you pay more, you get more tools. That would be slightly ridiculous in our philosophy of what we’re trying to do at radio. We want everybody to get everything. Yeah, but we’ve geared it around what we refer to as persons of influence.

So if you’re a church, 50 people, you’ve got one person of influence or if you are a church of 10,000 with a team of 50 people who are influential within your organization, then it’s tiered in that sense. Yeah. Talk about it. Promote it. Contact us. We get people emailing us who. We have to refer to people to other people, because they’re not, they can’t sign up.

They’re individuals who want their, how do we, how can I get my church to, I’ve got a problem. And then we have to say if you’ve got a pro, you need to do this, or whatever, so yeah. The more people talk about this, the better because things that are bad we know, don’t we stay in the dark or they try and stay in the dark, but no amount of darkness can subdue light. So I think the more light, the less darkness, it doesn’t work the other way around. Let’s, yeah. More light, Julie.

Julie: Yeah. That’s what I always say is that sunlight is the best disinfectant

John Horwood: and you send me a huge beam of sunlight in that ecosystem, Julie.

Yeah. Well done. Yeah,

Julie: it takes. A team, right? Takes a village. So we appreciate what work both of you are doing what digital Alibi is doing, and if we can be of help in any way, we wanna do that because the more accountability, the better. John and Ian, thank you so much for taking the time and for developing this system that you didn’t have to do.

John, you’re in retirement and you’re like no, I’m going to do something to change the world. Make it a better place.

John Horwood: I don’t think God mandates retirement, but I don’t see any retirees in the Bible.

Ian Mayer: I’m with John on, I’m not retiring. I’m just I’m not even gonna slow down.

Oh,

Julie: fantastic. Thank you both.

Ian Mayer: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

Julie: Thanks so much for listening to the Roy’s report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church. I’m Julie Royce, and just a quick reminder that the Roy’s report is listener supported. So if you appreciate these podcasts and want them to continue, would you please consider donating to the Roy’s report?

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Restore Promo: I’ve never seen anything in this like this in my lifetime.

Speaker 7: We need to be talking about spiritual abuse and religious trauma. This is a place where it’s safe for those who have been hurt in churches. It is also a place for people to learn more about how to respond to those situations, and it is much needed

Restore Promo: walking into the room, even taking the platform today felt so safe.

I, there was no nerves, there was no anything. I just, there is an atmosphere of support and comradery and love that’s here.

I think that it’s really become a kind of a refuge. It’s become a green pasture for people to come find one another and so many times there’s a solace, there is a restoration just in finding someone else that’s experienced what you’ve

experienced, to know that there are people from all over the country, all over the world who have experienced these same things and they’re uniting in Christ.

But healing, and I just think it’s a beautiful experience.

It’s not that we don’t love the church, it’s actually that we do love the church very much, and that’s why we’re having these kinds of conversations. It makes me feel less alone when I can talk with someone who’s had a shared experience like that.

It was so cool to. See, the room is packed and folks are eager to engage. They’re encouraged, but they’re also encouraging one another. And I believe that this is so good because the need is so great.

This conference is not only for those who’ve been victimized and hurt, but it is for people who want to be the answer now to what sadly, the church in the last 30 to 40 years has covered up and those who want to be.

The on the cutting edge of how God is moving to vindicate

to show his justice, to bring his healings. I just so believe in the power of story and we need to unite, and so I just. Would welcome any survivor to come and know that you’ll be loved. You’ll be heard. You’ll be seen. And this is just a safe place for all of us.

Julie: We celebrate what God is doing. We celebrate that the those that have been hurt and wounded by the church, that there’s a place that they can come that’s safe. And they can find healing, and they can find community and they can be ministered to. We celebrate that. It is so amazing, and at the same time, we grieve that, right?

How sad is it that we need to have a conference for people who have been wounded by the very place? The very institution that should be ministering, healing to them.