Train Your Church
Make your church the safest place a child can belong.
Shield & Eden brings evidence-based, survivor-informed, and theologically responsible training to Black churches — the whole framework, delivered in community and shaped to fit your congregation. Prevention is teachable. This is where your church begins.
A complete curriculum, delivered in community.
This is not a one-time seminar or an awareness campaign. It is Shield & Eden’s full framework — five evidence-based layers that move your congregation from understanding, to infrastructure, to lasting restoration — delivered as facilitated training and anchored by a book, because safeguarding is learned together, not alone. It is built specifically for the Black church, and it holds research, survivor wisdom, and responsible theology in the same hand.
What your congregation will be able to do.
By the end, your church won’t just know more. It will be able to act.
Understand the problem honestly.
The history, the evidence, and the specific realities of child sexual abuse within the Black church — named plainly, without euphemism.
Prevent abuse.
Recognize how abuse actually happens — through someone a child knows and trusts — and put real, sustainable protective measures in place.
Dismantle the theology of silence.
Name and rebuild the teachings — forced forgiveness, “touch not God’s anointed,” redemptive suffering — that have kept children and survivors quiet.
Respond rightly.
Know exactly what to do when a disclosure comes, with reporting duties understood and safeguarding infrastructure ready before a crisis.
Walk survivors toward healing.
Meet survivors of every gender with belief, care, and support — treating healing as sacred work the church is equipped to hold.
The right training for every role.
The same framework, taught to each audience at the right depth — so no one is left to guess their part.
Clergy
Pastors and senior leaders — carrying the theology and the church’s accountability for safeguarding.
Congregational leaders
Ministry heads, teachers, and volunteers — the trusted messengers who carry prevention into everyday church life.
Families
Parents and caregivers — equipped with prevention and the realities of disclosure.
Survivors
Survivors of every gender — centered in the healing work, on their own timeline.
How we bring it to your church.
You don’t need to have it figured out. You need to begin.
Reach out.
Tell us about your congregation — its size, its context, and where you are today. There is no church too small, and no starting point too early or too late.
We shape it with you.
The framework meets your church where it is. Together we set the depth, the pace, and the tracks that fit your leaders and your people.
Facilitated training.
Your leaders and members learn together, in community, over time — anchored by a book, guided by a facilitator, grounded in evidence.
Ongoing support.
You leave with tools, resources, and a clear path to sustain what you have built — so prevention becomes part of who your church is.
Prevention can’t wait for a crisis.
Most children who are harmed are harmed by someone their family already knows and trusts — and an arrest is made in only about 29% of child sexual abuse cases that reach law enforcement.1 Background checks and good intentions cannot carry the weight we place on them. What protects children is a congregation that has been equipped before anything happens — and when leaders are trained, prevention measurably improves.2 The safest time to begin was years ago. The next safest time is now.
Your facilitator.
Ashley Cook
Ashley brings more than 15 years in child protection advocacy and nonprofit leadership — helping advance North Carolina’s SAFE Child Act, co-developing prevention curricula that reached over 11,000 adults, and helping establish the World Day for Child Sexual Abuse Prevention. She facilitates every training personally, with the rigor of a researcher and the conviction that the church can be the safest place a child knows.
START THE CONVERSATIONEVERY CHURCH CAN BE SAFER. YOURS CAN START TODAY.
Reach out, and we’ll take the first step together. Tell us about your congregation, and we’ll help you find the way in.
Train Your Church — references
- Snyder, H. N. (2000). Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement. U.S. DOJ, Bureau of Justice Statistics (NCJ 182990).
- Rheingold, A. A., et al. (2015). Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Training for Childcare Professionals: An Independent Multi-Site Randomized Controlled Trial of Stewards of Children. Prevention Science, 16(3), 374–385.