Safety in the Sanctuary: Is Your Church Prepared?

He points out law enforcement agencies are no different than other places of business; they have to be careful with overtime and watch their workload, ensuring that they have the most manpower for the heaviest times of need.

“That means law enforcement is heavier on Friday and Saturday nights than any other day of the week,” says Chinn, whose brother is a Kansas sheriff. And though the lowest crime rate is on Sunday mornings, it often means there is a lower number of local law enforcement on call, with the average response time for a 911 emergency varying from state to state between eight minutes to as much as 20 minutes. A lot can happen in eight minutes, as Chinn would find out when a

shooter walked onto New Life’s campus in December of 2007 (see sidebar, “Three Minutes,” at the end of this article).

The issue of bringing weapons into the church is hard for many to talk about, and some churches contacted for this article declined to speak with Preaching on this topic. But 38 states and the District of Columbia currently allow or soon will allow concealed weapons in places of worship.

“You pray that the situation never would arise; but if it does, it’s important to be able to control the situation and take action should it be needed,” says McAuliffe from Willow Creek. “Having concealed weapons on the appropriate staff, who are well-trained, can sometimes mean the difference between a few or many getting hurt or seriously wounded.”

Pastor Brady Boyd of New Life Church agrees. “Personally, when pastors tell me they don’t have a plan for security, I think it’s unwise. We certainly don’t want to be alarmists and make people fearful; but at the same time … I don’t think God has any problem at all with us protecting and defending ourselves.”

Chinn says that the reality for most churches is that someone in their congregation will have a weapon on them. “If you’ve got more than a hundred people, you probably have someone carrying,” he says. “We would much rather have a group of people who have trained together, who are using the right kind of equipment (bullets not prone to ricochet and create collateral damage) and who know what the plan is and have talked about all the variables that can happen with a shooting in a crowded environment.

“If you have a team that has planned together that way, your chance of having a relatively successful outcome is much higher than if you just say, ‘I know there are people in the audience who are carrying, so we don’t need a security plan,’” continues Chinn. “That’s not a good way to approach anything, especially the safety of a congregation.”

Over the past 10 years Chinn has tracked and studied news and police reports and has evaluated 184 different deadly force incidents occurring within a ministry environment. “There are 336,000 or so churches in the United States that are not mega-church size,” says Chinn. “The vast majority of the deadly force incidents I have tracked come from those smaller churches.”