Pastoral Difficulties & Safeguarding

What should I do if a difficult pastoral situation comes up?

It’s important to remember that the mission of our Homegroups is to provide ‘a real meeting with God and a real meeting with each other’. Homegroup should never be a place where we try to counsel people, diagnose people or troubleshoot people’s problems. Homegroups’ role is to point people to Jesus and to pray for them.

If someone in your group is facing something particularly challenging, and it seems like they need some extra support, you can arrange for either yourself or another group member to meet up with them to chat and pray. Crucially though, this should never be in place of professional, medical support, if that’s what’s needed.

If you’re not sure how you and your group can best support someone who is struggling, your cluster leader is always available to you to help out, either by answering your questions on how to help someone or by meeting up with the individual themselves. Similarly, if someone is asking you difficult questions you don’t know the answer to, there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying you don’t know and passing their question onto the staff team.

Confidentiality and safeguarding

Homegroups are a great place to be journeying alongside one another in our relationships with Jesus. They can be places of great depth of relationship and vulnerability. We want people to have the expectation that what they share or hear in homegroup stays within the group with the exception of when it comes to a safeguarding concern.

A safeguarding concern is a concern that an individual is experiencing, or at risk of experiencing, abuse and harm. In this case it is our responsibility to pass it on to the safeguarding lead (Carrie Brown) by emailing safeguarding@kingdomvineyard.com or calling 01334 845131.

We would ask you to remind your group regularly (for example before prayer ministry starts) about this balance between confidentiality and the need to pass on safeguarding concerns.

Here’s what you might say to your group:

Before we begin prayer ministry, we just want to remind you that homegroup is a confidential space where you’re free to share what’s going on in your life, safe in the knowledge that this won’t be passed onto anyone outside of the group. The exception to this is that if during a time of sharing, a member shares something that raises a concern that someone might be at risk of harm, we have a duty to pass that information onto our safeguarding team.*

Practically, that would look like we, as the homegroup leaders, contacting the Safeguarding Lead to report what has been shared with us with the aim of getting the person the right support. If we sense that someone is in immediate danger from what they’ve shared, we would call the emergency services with the person’s permission.**

* We would recommend sharing this paragraph regularly with your group, certainly every time there is someone new in the room

** This part adds some extra information, it most likely doesn't need saying every time you say the first paragraph, but it might be helpful to include when you've got someone new attending

Children and young people in homegroups

We are occasionally asked whether under 18s can join one of our homegroups. Because we have a dedicated youth group, and we want adults to be able to share freely in homegroups, we have concluded that it is in everyone’s best interests to invite young people to our youth group, and keep homegroups as an adults-only space. The exception to this is socials. If your homegroup is holding a social, and the activity is family-friendly, then under 18s are welcome to join in, as long as everyone in the group is comfortable with it, and the parents remain responsible for their young people for the duration of the event.