That's true, it's a tough call! But does protecting vulnerable members of the community really require that other members of the church know about a choir member's past drug conviction? Or really, even about a choir member's name on a list of sex offenders, if they aren't going to be supervising young people?
There are definitely fingerprint-included background checks where the organization asks about only very specific things and doesn't hear back if anything else comes up. My church does those for Sunday school teachers, pastors, and adult nursery volunteers. But even those have a really steep chilling effect on the kind of people who are disproportionately likely to have unjust criminal records, whether they would pull up those records or not. You might want to scare them out of being Sunday School teachers, but do you need to scare them out of working on the garden? They also need to have a way exist as people in the world.
My church also works heavily with prison and homeless ministries on the ground level and almost always has at least one or two volunteers or part-time employees or partner workers who would not pass a standard check. You could say that with those people you will do the checks but leave the option to make a judgement call - but if you're overriding them at will, what are you getting from them that's worth the chilling effect?
Certainly run relevant checks on the people who are going to be trusted alone with other people's children, and the people who are going to be the authority figures that other people would bring reports of problems to. But there are absolutely middle grounds between "quickly brush it entirely under the rug" and "mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy because they are on a government list". In fact, the acceptance of the second is generally what leads to the first, because if middle grounds aren't provided, people will generally choose "nothing really happened" over "this is a Bad Person we can't interact with anymore". And questions of how to balance protecting the community with providing support to everyone who needs it is always a struggle, but it's really deep down inherently what Christian doctrine is about struggling with! Christian communities *should* struggle with this, it's when they stop struggling and think they know that they go wrong.
(Also, seriously, sex offender listings like show up in those checks are really, really bad at filtering out the people who are a danger to your kids. If *all* you're doing is a fingerprint check, you're not protecting your community, you're protecting your own ass. The people who are a real danger to your kids are the ones who haven't made it onto the lists, and most of the things that get you on the lists aren't directly correlated with committing in-person crimes against actual children.)
no subject
There are definitely fingerprint-included background checks where the organization asks about only very specific things and doesn't hear back if anything else comes up. My church does those for Sunday school teachers, pastors, and adult nursery volunteers. But even those have a really steep chilling effect on the kind of people who are disproportionately likely to have unjust criminal records, whether they would pull up those records or not. You might want to scare them out of being Sunday School teachers, but do you need to scare them out of working on the garden? They also need to have a way exist as people in the world.
My church also works heavily with prison and homeless ministries on the ground level and almost always has at least one or two volunteers or part-time employees or partner workers who would not pass a standard check. You could say that with those people you will do the checks but leave the option to make a judgement call - but if you're overriding them at will, what are you getting from them that's worth the chilling effect?
Certainly run relevant checks on the people who are going to be trusted alone with other people's children, and the people who are going to be the authority figures that other people would bring reports of problems to. But there are absolutely middle grounds between "quickly brush it entirely under the rug" and "mark someone as unfixably bad and untrustworthy because they are on a government list". In fact, the acceptance of the second is generally what leads to the first, because if middle grounds aren't provided, people will generally choose "nothing really happened" over "this is a Bad Person we can't interact with anymore". And questions of how to balance protecting the community with providing support to everyone who needs it is always a struggle, but it's really deep down inherently what Christian doctrine is about struggling with! Christian communities *should* struggle with this, it's when they stop struggling and think they know that they go wrong.
(Also, seriously, sex offender listings like show up in those checks are really, really bad at filtering out the people who are a danger to your kids. If *all* you're doing is a fingerprint check, you're not protecting your community, you're protecting your own ass. The people who are a real danger to your kids are the ones who haven't made it onto the lists, and most of the things that get you on the lists aren't directly correlated with committing in-person crimes against actual children.)