The Australian Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse reveals some revolting conduct on the part of church organisations and government authorities; but what is unsaid is that the behaviour was produced in partnership with a complicit social context. There was a tendency in the 40s to 50s and even 60s to regard children as lesser people, almost as objects for the application of authority against them, to regard church groups as trusted self-governing organisations that 'knew best' as they engaged in the (public) humiliation, terrifying of and injuriously inflicting immense pain upon children. Most parents hit their children and thought that it was the right thing to do. It was not. Police acted as though children were congenitally oppositional and failed to believe them, as did other authorities, and if they didn't, nothing a child said was important anyway.
However, churches should be influenced by the Bible and not society.
Where's the starting point?
There are a few candidates, but all together the scriptures structure the way church organisations should work and provide no excuse for the godless behaviour they abetted.
Let's start with Matthew 18:6. Our lord was so concerned that children's relationship with him be unimpaired by the actions of adults that he reserved the most grave fate for those who transgressed it. This alone should have exercised church authorities to remove the cancer of evil from their communities. But it did not.
And churches should have known, as Lord Acton observed, that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". The Spirit got there first, however in Jeremiah 17:9. "The heart is wicked...who can know it."
Knowing this and that we are all sinners, all prone to damage others, their guard should have been up, particularly as they saw people doing directly what the scriptures opposed: Ephesians 6:4 tells us how to raise children (and don't think that Proverbs 23:13 overturns this; it is a proverb, not a command; it is figurative not descriptive, just compare it to the extravagant language in other proverbs: do you really put a knife to your throat when you eat with the king, Proverbs 23:1-2?).
So what should a church organisation have done if it saw someone behaving against Ephesians 6:4, and not conforming in their manner to the vulnerable as Galatians 5:22 instructs?
Should they have kept it 'in-house'? Not at all!
Knowing the wickedness of a person who so acted, and that the corruption of power was at hand, seeing behaviour that was disjoined from a community infused with the Spirit of our saviour they should have excised the perpetrators from that community immediately (there's plenty of basis in the Bible for dis-fellowshipping evil-doers) and referred the people involved to the police, because the state holds the sword for the restraint of evil. Romans 13:3-5 and not the church.
