Julie Fu
I joined the Board of Deacons in January 2024 as the new Fellowship Deacon. During the first BOD meeting, I learned there was so much need around safety: youth workers reported a backlog and loopholes in our background check process, pastoral staff discussed the need for education around abuse prevention and response, and stewardship reported physical and property updates that were lacking. Deacon Sean and I had just met. He leaned over to me and asked: “What are you supposed to do?” I replied: “Fellowship deacon”. He answered “maybe you should prayerfully consider being our ‘Safety Deacon’”. And that is how I became the safety deacon!
After that first BOD meeting, I felt called to serve as the Safety deacon, focusing on the following: updating our background checks, safeguarding our church against abuse, and improving the physical safety of our church home. I felt called to implement a comprehensive and updated approach toward improving the safety of our congregation. With the rise of Asian hate in the wake of the COVID pandemic, increasing gun violence, church shootings and vandalism, our church home had room for many safety improvements that schools and nonprofits around us had already implemented.
Each safety initiative has had its own unique set of challenges, but through those challenges God has been faithful and truly a source of strength and wisdom. When I look back at my personal walk with God, I can’t help but think about the ways He has provided many years of learning opportunities, humility, and service-perhaps to prepare me for this role. I grew up in a similar Chinese heritage, multigenerational church in Seattle, WA and there was a strong emphasis on participation and serving. I have been a kids Sunday school teacher, nursery helper, volunteer with worship and the choir, and part of the leadership team of our young adult careers group and another sister church’s young careers group. Each serving opportunity was challenging in its own way and provided a lot of growth opportunities.
CBCGB similarly is a multigenerational, multiethnic, multilingual church which makes it beautiful, but also complex. Within our own church there are many different backgrounds, value systems and viewpoints. For example, one initiative was to strengthen our background checks. Due to our proximity to other states as well as the number of transplants from other areas of the country, we felt it was important to move from a Massachusetts-only background check to a national background check.
While many members understood the expansion of background checks, some volunteers needed to weigh the need for comprehensive national checks with desiring personal information privacy. I was deeply encouraged by the brothers and sisters who ultimately participated, even when they were uncomfortable with the online platform. They trusted God with their information and worries and also put the needs of others before their own. Even when it wasn’t easy, I was encouraged by their decision to ultimately trust that God would provide and protect.
Our main church building is over 35 years old. Not only is maintenance needed, but safety updates are as well. Areas of weakness were assessed by a professional safety and security company, which included recommendations for video security monitoring, perimeter lighting, access control, mitigating damage from unauthorized access, and signage not only for visitors, but also for emergency personnel. During one of these many meetings, one of the professionals stated, “This is an unpopular statement, but important: Safety and security must be slightly inconvenient”. Target hardening is defined as the process of strengthening the security of a building or area to make it less vulnerable to attacks, theft, or other criminal activities. To properly target harden our property, especially the most vulnerable area: our children and infants, we needed to make things slightly challenging to people who may wish harm.
These very tangible updates cost very real dollars, and as an organization based on donations and goodwill, how would we decide what to prioritize, what to fund-raise for and do we need to shift funding away from existing needs with an already tight budget? Spending money is a hot button topic in our church (and likely other churches as well) especially as all of us are called to be good stewards of the resources God has given us. Church leadership felt convicted to update the children’s space which was long overdue and had 6 points of unmanned entry. Children’s ministry leaders have wanted a single access point for over 10 years, and praise God it finally happened early 2025. We also added security cameras and automated access control. But what about the rest of the campus? I was so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to apply for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Nonprofit Security Grant Program and the Commonwealth Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
These applications were very involved and time intensive. In addition, one of the due dates opened 5 months earlier than expected, and the due date coincided with the additional congregational meetings around the church building expansion project during the months of April and May 2024. As a full-time physician with a demanding job, mother of 3 young kids, a wife, and an already very busy deacon load, it was literally a miracle to get these applications done, and even more so that God blessed us as one of the winners of both grants. We had competition from all over the country and the commonwealth, and CBCGB was picked for a total of about $272,000. I cannot emphasize how much God’s hand was in this blessing and how much I had to trust Him-for wisdom, energy, efficiency, for stamina and for carving out time. And even though the ultimate outcome of the FEMA grant is now uncertain with this new administration, I trust God will provide. For God has said “I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” (Isaiah 46:4 NIV)
God is our ultimate protector. However, we are all sinners, and abuse happens everywhere-even in churches and even in Asian-heritage churches. We cannot stand up to abuse if we are in denial about the reality of abuse. Instead, Jesus calls us to be “wise as serpents.” (Matthew 10:16). We must be committed to caring for survivors of abuse, protecting the vulnerable and holding abusers accountable. All of us must take responsibility to become educated about abuse and take responsibility to protect each other.
As many of you know we participated in the Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (G.R.A.C.E.) Safeguarding Initiative in 2024. In June 2024, there was a leader’s meeting and in Sept 2024 an All-Congregation Safeguarding seminar which brought 130+ in-person attendees, up to 94 online for 4 hours on a Saturday afternoon. This turnout was fantastic and on par with many of our congregational meetings. We also have our own Safeguarding Team now (the current team is Pastor Patrick Chen, Elder Joshua Lin, myself, Jesse Wang, Mark Liu, Jessica Tsai and Flora Chang). The goal of the Safeguarding Team is to prevent opportunities for abuse and respond if abuse is suspected, witnessed, or reported. We not only updated the Safe Church Policy for January 2025, but we have a new Safeguarding Abuse Prevention and Response Policy to help guide these safety goals.
If you were at the March 23, 2025 services you heard the policy team in action when we reviewed the outcomes of our first report. It was a humbling experience as we put policy and teams to the test. But at the end, I am so grateful we were able to mitigate future harm, and I am so grateful for those who spoke up and shared information, and most importantly, for the bravery and trust of the victim in sharing their story. G.R.A.C.E. explained early on, that the hardest thing isn’t holding meetings or writing policies, but it’s culture change, it’s people change, it’s deep individual change to take on the commitments of God and His character. It is to take to heart that God is a refuge for the abused and never ignores their cry (Psalm 9:9,12).
I am so grateful for the Safeguarding Policy Team (in addition to myself, Pastor Steven Bowman, Pastor Patrick Chen, Sophie Yang, Tony Ng, Elsie Cheng) for spending the year working with G.R.A.C.E. rewriting countless revisions on the policy to personalize it to our church congregation. While this topic will always be sensitive, I am encouraged to see our congregation more open about acknowledging its existence, not hiding from it, and as the recent example showed, being bold and overcoming fear. So many future people were likely protected from this recent incident report, and for that I give God all praise and glory. I can see the culture shift, and I am so proud of our church family taking giant steps forward to embody God’s priority of justice for the vulnerable that comes with his Kingdom.
As with any large organization, there can be internal and external challenges. I had to work not only with multiple groups and individuals within our congregation, but multiple outside companies and personalities. Sometimes it worked out very smoothly, and other times it was ultimately stressful, and we had to make tough decisions to part ways. Yet the work still needed to get done. Other issues in church would come up requiring BOD attention and efforts, but this work needed to continue. There were more meetings than I can count. More emails than I’ve ever written, hundreds of decisions, thousands of dollars in proposals and I learned more than I ever thought I would learn about public safety and abuse prevention.
I am extremely grateful to those who helped with all the safety initiatives including but not limited to: Pastoral Staff, Stewardship, Finance, and a special thank you to Philip Sailer, Tony Ng, Lilian Wang, Sophie Yang for their on the ground efforts in rolling out all of the Safety initiatives of 2024, and for those that are involved in ongoing work and implementation for 2025, including Ted Chen, Joseph Chiu, Sean Wang, Jesse Wang and the rest of the office staff including Weihsin Chau, Eric Young and Mark Luo. Thank you also to Melissa Yang for her encouraging and reliable support in translation-for being a bridge across language and culture, and for always making sure she understands the meaning behind my words. There will likely be more people to thank at the end of 2025, and many of them are already an answer to prayer. I am confident that God provided their support at just the right time. I am continually reminded that “my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19 ESV). Praise to our Lord, for how much He has challenged, grown and blessed CBCGB in 2024. I know that even if I try my best to organize, anticipate and plan, God’s plans and timing are best. I look forward to what He has in store for us for the rest of 2025.
Julie Fu is from Cross Bridge, church Safety Deacon
Edited by Hongxing Zhang
