By Michael Peabody, Esq.
There is a congregation in the Central Valley that most people have never heard of. It is the kind of church that shows up faithfully every week, potluck on the third weekend of the month, Vacation Bible School in July. Good people. Trusting people. The kind of people who believe the best about their neighbors because Scripture tells them to.
A few years ago, a man began volunteering in their children’s ministry. He was warm, attentive, good with kids. No one asked hard questions. No one ran a check. He had been in the congregation for a few months and had offered to help. That was enough.
It was not enough. He had a prior conviction in another county that a simple fingerprint-based background check would have surfaced immediately. The harm that followed was real, and the grief that settled over that congregation was the kind that does not lift quickly.
California has now made LiveScan background checks a legal requirement for church volunteers working with minors and vulnerable adults. Some churches have received this news with resistance. They should not. They should receive it as an invitation — long overdue — to take seriously what the Scripture has always required of those entrusted with the care of others.
“Be Sure to Know the Condition of Your Flocks”
The language of pastoral responsibility runs throughout Scripture. Elders are charged not merely to preach but to shepherd. The metaphor is deliberate. A shepherd who does not know the condition of the flock is not simply negligent. He has abandoned the role entirely.
“Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds.” — Proverbs 27:23
Knowing the condition of the flock now includes knowing who is in the field with them. The volunteer who teaches your third-graders, leads your youth small group, or sits with your elderly congregants during the week is, for that hour, a shepherd. Prudence demands that you know something about them beyond their smile and their willingness to show up.
The Apostle Paul’s instruction to Timothy about the selection of church leaders sets a high bar: those in positions of trust must be above reproach, tested first, found blameless. The principle does not evaporate for volunteers. If anything, the breadth of volunteer access to vulnerable populations makes the principle more urgent, not less.
“Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, and do not share in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure.” — 1 Timothy 5:22
A background check is not the laying on of hands. But the caution embedded in that instruction, the recognition that authorization carries risk and requires discernment, applies directly to the question of who we put in rooms with our children.
What LiveScan Actually Does
LiveScan is California’s fingerprint-based background check system, now mandated for church volunteers under California Business and Professions Code §18975, enacted as AB 506, which took effect January 1, 2022. The law applies to any youth service organization — a category that expressly includes churches — and requires all administrators, employees, and regular volunteers who have direct contact with or supervision of children to complete both a LiveScan background check and child abuse identification training. Unlike a name search, which can be defeated by a name change or a false identity, fingerprints are biometric. They query actual arrest and conviction records tied to a unique identifier that no one can falsify.
For the sake of due diligence and best practices, any volunteer who may at some point be alone with a child, even walking them to a class, should be screened.
For positions involving contact with minors or vulnerable adults, this is not a technical distinction. No volunteer coordinator, however spiritually perceptive, can determine through a conversation whether the affable man sitting across from them has a prior conviction for child endangerment in another state. LiveScan can. That asymmetry of information is the entire argument for requiring the check.
The process is not punitive. It does not presume guilt. It is, rather, the institutional equivalent of what any responsible parent does when they ask who else will be in the house before dropping off their child for a sleepover. It is ordinary prudence, applied at scale.
Answering the Objections
Several sincere objections arise when churches confront this requirement. They deserve honest answers, not dismissal.
“We are a church of grace. We don’t treat our volunteers like criminals.”
Grace and accountability are not opposites. Requiring a background check no more implies that a volunteer is suspected of wrongdoing than requiring a driver’s license implies that a driver is suspected of recklessness. It is a baseline verification that exists precisely because the stakes are high. Grace extends to the volunteer. It also extends to the eight-year-old in the classroom. Both matter.
“We know our people. We don’t need the government telling us who to trust.”
The congregation in the Central Valley knew their volunteer too. The problem is not familiarity but information. Community trust tells you how someone presents. It does not tell you what is in their record. The church that relies solely on relational knowledge to screen volunteers has confused warmth with wisdom.
It is also worth noting that this is not the government telling you who to trust. It is the government requiring that you gather basic information before placing someone in a position of authority over children. The decision about who to trust remains entirely with the congregation.
“Couldn’t someone harm a child without any prior record?”
Yes. A background check is not a guarantee. It closes one door, not every door. But a shepherd who refuses to close the door they can close, on the grounds that other doors exist, has failed in their stewardship. We lock our church buildings at night even though a determined burglar can break a window. The logic is the same.
“I already had a LiveScan done for another organization. Why do I need to do it again?”
This is one of the most common and understandable points of frustration, and it deserves a direct answer. Under California Business and Professions Code §18975 (AB 506), LiveScan results are organization-specific. The California Department of Justice issues each organization a unique Organization Record Identifier (ORI) and background check results are submitted to and held by that organization’s designated Custodian of Records. A result processed for your school district, your prior church, or any other youth-serving organization cannot be accessed by or transferred to your current congregation.
This is not bureaucratic redundancy. It reflects how the system is actually designed to work. When a volunteer completes a LiveScan through your church, your Custodian of Records becomes the recipient of any subsequent arrest or conviction notifications from the DOJ going forward. That ongoing monitoring relationship, not just the initial snapshot, is part of what the law creates. A prior check run through a different organization provides your church with no such notification chain. It is, from your congregation’s legal and practical standpoint, as if it were never done.
There is also a more basic point. A LiveScan run three years ago for a different organization captures only what was in the record at that moment, for that organization’s purposes. It does not tell your church what may have entered the record since. The law requires churches to hold their own checks, through their own ORI, so that the accountability is theirs, not borrowed from some other institution’s paperwork. (For Adventists in California, the Conference will be the Custodian of records.)
“This feels like government overreach into church affairs.”
Religious liberty is a genuine value, and Adventists in particular have a long memory for the ways the state can encroach on the conscience of the church. But the First Amendment does not exempt a congregation from the same duty of care that every school, hospital, and civic organization already owes to the people it serves. The law here does not regulate doctrine or worship. It requires that churches protect the children in their care by gathering information that was always available and always relevant.
Stewardship Is Not Passive
There is a reflexive tendency in some corners of religious leadership to treat external accountability requirements as evidence of insufficient faith, as though God will protect the children if the church simply trusts Him enough. This conflates theology with negligence.
Scripture is full of men and women who trusted God and also built arks, posted watchmen, tested prophets, and sent spies ahead of the advance. Faith and prudence have never been in competition. The tradition of stewardship in Christian theology is premised on the recognition that those entrusted with responsibility for others will be asked what they did with it.
“But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet to warn the people, and the sword comes and takes someone’s life… I will hold the watchman accountable.” — Ezekiel 33:6
The watchman does not choose whether to watch. That is the office. A church that declines to screen its volunteers because it trusts in divine protection has not demonstrated faith. It has declined the office.
A Floor, Not a Ceiling
LiveScan compliance is a beginning, not a conclusion. The congregation that runs fingerprint checks and considers itself done has confused paperwork with protection. A serious child safety program also includes clear codes of conduct, mandatory training on abuse recognition, policies prohibiting unsupervised one-on-one contact between adults and minors, and an accessible, genuinely safe pathway for anyone who observes concerning behavior to report it without fear.
The overwhelming majority of people who volunteer in church ministry do so from authentic care and genuine faith. They deserve to serve alongside colleagues who have been properly vetted. Background checks protect volunteers as much as they protect those served, because they create the institutional conditions under which trust is warranted rather than merely assumed.
The family in the Central Valley did not need a more sophisticated theology of grace. They needed someone to run the check.
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” — John 10:11
The measure of pastoral care is not sentiment. It is sacrifice. It is doing the difficult, sometimes uncomfortable work of protecting people who cannot protect themselves. California has required a minimum. The calling of the church has always required more.
Michael Peabody is an attorney and the president of Founders’ First Freedom, a 501c3 organization dedicated to preserving liberty of conscience, and editor of ReligiousLiberty.TV, a publication tracking religious freedom cases and church-state developments. Subscribe at https://religiouslibertytv.substack.com