Safety in the Sanctuary: Is Your Church Prepared?

Chinn and others realized that a security program was needed, and he participated on the committee that was tasked with developing it. After the Oklahoma City bombings happened in 1995, Chinn was asked to work with an assistant to the president at Focus to create a ministry-wide emergency action plan that would allow the ministry to be ready for any major incident. The facilities department would fund the parts and pieces needed, and the security department would manage it. On May 2, 1995, Chinn turned in their budget proposal to the vice president. As the budget process progressed over the next year, some items were approved and others taken out of the proposal.

One year later, on May 2, 1996, Chinn was in his office at Focus. The work he had done for the emergency action plan was progressing, and some of the security systems that had been approved had just been installed. “They were so new, they hadn’t even been tested yet,” Chinn remembers. One of those systems was a radio alert, where people in strategic places of vulnerability could hit a button and the entire security team would be notified at once over radio that there was a problem.

As Chinn was working in his office that day, his radio sounded an alarm, notifying him there was a situation needing attention at the front desk in the administration building.

Chinn got up to walk to the nearby location. “I remember thinking it was probably the receptionist wondering what the button was about,” he says. Looking at his watch, he timed the distance from his desk to the front lobby. Seventeen seconds wasn’t bad.

That’s when he looked up and saw the gun.

A man who had been permanently injured while working as a construction worker when the Colorado offices for Focus were being built had taken two women in the front lobby hostage and was threatening to blow up the building. Because of the ministry’s quick security response, effective law enforcement tactics and prayer, the man was ultimately convinced by police to release the hostages and eventually taken into custody. But for Chinn, if security had not been at the forefront of his mind before, it certainly was now.

Bringing Guns to Church

Since that day, Chinn has made it a personal mission to help others understand the importance of security in a ministry environment. His experiences can be found in his new book, Strong Tower. A member of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo., Chinn was part of the team that began to develop a security plan for the church in 2005.

At the time, the entire security team was made up of volunteers (New Life has since created a staff position for a Director of Life Safety). It was decided that a small group of the team would be armed as part of their safety responsibilities, though that fact was never advertised or made public.

“We knew that if a violent offender ever came into the church, we wanted to be able to respond appropriately,” explains Chinn.