PROTESTANT Churches in Europe have launched an “awareness initiative” to help communities that lack resources and experience to tackle sexual violence.

“According to Christian ethics, safeguarding people against sexual violence is an integral part of the Church’s mandate — in the past, we have fallen short,” the Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE) said.

“Many of our member-Churches have taken structured measures to protect vulnerable persons, whilst others have only recently made protection a priority. Where Churches accept this responsibility and put it into practice, they help raise awareness within their societies.”

The statement was published during a three-day conference at the Christian Theology Academy, Warsaw, organised with Justice Initiative, a Swiss-based international network for abuse survivors.

The CPCE said that its General Assembly had commissioned a project for promoting good practice, in tandem with a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe demanding improved protection.

Protestant Churches across the continent, it said, would now be helped to “learn from one another and further develop proven safeguarding frameworks”.

Established under the 1973 Leuenberg Agreement on full communion, the CPCE, also known by its German acronym GEKE, comprises 96 Lutheran, Reformed, United, and Methodist Churches, in more than 30 European countries.

The Polish Evangelical Lutheran Church, which hosted the conference, said that delegates had discussed whether a “Protestant model” existed for countering sexual violence, which had been wrongly viewed as a problem particularly affecting Roman Catholics.

Its report said that a “distorted view of church fellowship” had sometimes excused a “culture of silence” among Protestants, while “concepts of forgiveness and justification by grace through faith” had been misused to justify “power imbalances despite democratic governance structures”.

The president of Justice Initiative, Guido Fluri, said that the CPCE statement appeared to lay “the foundation for a collective change in mindset” and could “become a model for churches and for other sectors of society still at the very beginning of addressing past abuse”.