The people were seated, and Pastor Dennis Rogers was at the pulpit.
“Let us pray,” he said.
then chaos.
A bomb shattered the silence of Sunday prayer. The explosion ripped through the heart of a sanctuary and its worshipers.
The bomb, which investigators discovered had been left outside the building near a central air-conditioning unit, tore a 10-by-15 foot hole in the sanctuary wall adjacent to the church’s youth-seating section. Of the 35 people injured that morning, more than 20 were teenagers.
When Rogers reflects on that Memorial Day weekend in 1998, he realizes it could have been much worse.
Now, more than a year and a half later, the veteran of more than 20 years of ministry says the congregation at First Assembly of God in Danville, Illinois, is stronger than it has ever been.
Rogers knows people should feel safe in God’s house. But he, like many pastors, struggles with how to protect those who attend his church while remaining an open, welcoming community where people can come freely to find Christ.
“We want to provide a secure worship environment for our staff, our members, and our guests,” says Ron Aguiar, director of safety and security at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, a congregation of about 17,000. “Because it’s a church, I have to balance how I do it. I cannot put magnetometers on the front doors and use metal detectors.
“We’re seeking the lost—you want the people that the police are after to come in. Essentially, when I work with our police department, they’ll say, ‘Hey man, these guys are undesirable.’ I say, ‘Hey man, this is where they need to be.’ And so there’s a delicate balance that you have to achieve.”
Few people understand the struggle to find that balance like Al Meredith, pastor of Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Meredith leads a congregation that lost its sense of security last September when a gunman barged into a Wednesday night youth rally and gunned down 14 people, killing seven.
“You can’t protect,” says Meredith. “There is no safe place in the universe except the center of God’s will. You can make your church a fortress; you can put armed guards at every door; you can set metal detectors at every door and waste the kingdom’s resources. But it’s trusting in horses and chariots.
“I guess it’s a matter of where you draw the line, what degree you take. You go to reasonable measures.”
Violence comes to church
What constitutes reasonable measures? It’s a subject of considerable debate among church leaders.
Jeff Hanna, pastor of Galion First United Methodist Church in Ohio and the author of Safe and Secure: The Alban Guide to Protecting Your Congregation, says, “Very few people across the country are dealing with this issue. I started looking for things that had been written and couldn’t find anything.”
Hanna, a former police officer, has been in demand as a church security consultant since the Wedgwood incident.
Statistics addressing the number of crimes perpetrated against churches are hard to find.
“There is no repository or database of information for church crime,” Aguiar says. “Everything is mishmash. If there’s a burglary, when the police get it they don’t say ‘church crime,’ they say ‘burglary.’ “
Though news of the Wedgwood shooting was beamed across America, several other disturbing church crimes have gone unreported by the national media and unnoticed by most of the Christian community.
In mid-October, two Hispanic men were killed in the parking lot of Faith United Methodist Church in Southaven, Tennessee, while attending a Sunday evening youth service at The House of Praise, a Hispanic congregation that has used building space on the property for the past year.
Last July, a small group leader at First Church of God in Sidney, Ohio, was shot and killed in his home by a member of the congregation who had associations with a satanic cult.
Last March, a pastor’s sermon was interrupted at New St. John Fellowship Baptist Church in Gonzales, Louisiana, when a gunman kicked open the sanctuary doors and fired two gunshots into the ceiling. He proceeded to kill his wife, 2-year-old son, and another congregant, while wounding four others.
And in September 1998, Pastor Andrew Lofton of Christ Temple Apostolic Faith Church was talking to a group of Bible-study participants following the Wednesday evening service when he was shot and killed by a choir member.
What to defend against?
Hanna says incidents such as the Wedgwood shooting should be seen as “aberrations.”
“I’m more concerned about day-to-day things,” he says, “people breaking into my church and taking my sound system, people getting assaulted in the parking lot. I don’t think we’re going to see a huge, rapid increase of church violence.”
Aguiar and Rogers don’t see it that way.
The most important security device at any location in America is a cell phone.
—Chester Quarles
“I think the church fails to realize this is spiritual warfare,” says Aguiar, whose on-campus security concerns include a 9,000-seat sanctuary, 773,000 square feet of building space and more than 100 acres of property. “To me, it’s going to get worse, not better.”
Rogers says the fear of God that was once the cornerstone of American society is now gone.
“Heretofore, there was a holy reverence for the house of God. That is gone in this country,” he says. “So rather than thinking these are isolated incidents, I believe they’re going to increase.”
The security challenge
Believing the worst is yet to come doesn’t mean Rogers and his church have significantly changed their long-term approach to security.
Prior to the 1998 bombing, the church installed nighttime security lights and asked ushers to periodically patrol the parking lot. A year and a half later, the lights are still there and ushers continue to keep an eye on things, but Rogers says the church has no intention of turning itself into Fort Knox.
“We did clean all of the shrubbery away from the perimeter of the building,” he says. “Many churches in the area did that.”
The church also changed its locks, replacing old keys with ones that cannot be duplicated.
“We discussed putting in a video security system,” he says. “We discussed having a guard full-time. But we came to the conclusion that if there is a person who is determined to set a bomb or shoot a gun, there is not a lot you can do to stop it.”
Meredith, still reeling from the massacre at his church, believes it is impractical and unreasonable to implement wide-sweeping security changes at his church.
Before the shooting at Wedgwood, Meredith says his church’s security measures were relatively simple and included screening procedures and background checks on nursery, children’s and youth workers and a policy that requires two adults in each nursery classroom. The church also has an electronic security system to protect the building when it’s unoccupied.
Those measures have remained in place since the shooting, but Meredith says introducing a new round of security procedures is unlikely.
“I don’t foresee it becoming a fortress with police cars in the parking lot and screening every weird-looking person who comes in,” he says, “because frankly, there are a whole lot of believers who are weird looking. To me what the undershepherd does is protect the flock from the attacks of the wicked one.
“I know that just sounds unbelievably idealistic and smugly spiritual, and I don’t want to come across that way. But I cannot imagine the early church hiring private police to protect them in the catacombs or from Rome or anywhere else the prince of darkness seeks to bring destruction.”
Doctrine of internal security
Bob Welch, associate professor of church administration at Fort Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, also has taken cues from the early church to develop his security philosophy. But his interpretation of the apostles’ approach reflects a different understanding than Meredith’s.
He says the church in the Book of Acts had a keen understanding of the importance of providing first-century Christians with a sense of security.
“They met in homes; they went into caves. In Rome, what are the catacombs?” he wonders rhetorically. “If they were going to get caught and were martyred, they at least made an attempt to be safe, even going so far as to use some secret signs like the fish.
“Knowing that we are now in a culture that can be quite anti-Christian and is becoming more hostile, I think there’s a valid reason for us to think about that. If it means trying to supply internal security, I think God expects us as rational people to do that.”
Welch’s opinion isn’t just a personally held opinion. It’s also included in his curriculum at Southwestern, which counted five of the 14 Wedgwood victims among its students and alumni.
“We have, for a long time, taught security issues—lighting, internal security,” says Welch, a 22-year veteran of the United States Navy. But he expects more of an emphasis on the issue in the wake of the crosstown shooting, noting that most of the current teaching is included in the administration classes.
“It’s much easier to make an example in class when you have something across the neighborhood instead of across the state,” he says.
While Meredith and Welch allow the New Testament to guide their security efforts, Aguiar looks to the Old Testament, pointing to Nehemiah 4:9—”But we prayed to God, and because of them we set up a guard against them day and night”—as an example of the way congregations ought to respond to potential problems.
And though some pastors would bristle at Southeast Christian Church’s approach to security—there’s video surveillance, a guard on duty around the clock, a police car parked at the building throughout the day, armed guards to escort ushers after the offering is collected and uniformed officers who direct traffic and patrol the parking lot before, during, and after services—Hanna points to the church as the paradigm for church security in the 21st century.
A proactive defense
Improving security, Hanna believes, starts with changing the mindset of a church’s leaders. That can begin with the formation of a church security team.
“Everybody needs to look at their parking lot lights,” says Chester Quarles, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Mississippi. Quarles is a certified protection professional who has designed training and crisis plans for missionaries and worked with leaders at Wycliffe Translators to examine their security procedures.
“Walk the darkest places and recesses of the church, daytime and nighttime. Make sure doors and locks and frames are secure.”
Team members also should review police reports from the past few years to examine how other area churches have been violated, adds Quarles.
In addition, churches should meet with officials from local law enforcement agencies to ask for help. The church should start by showing police the building and asking for suggestions on how to make it safer. Ask for recommendations about getting the offering to the bank safely.
“You’d be surprised,” says Aguiar, “how much free stuff they can advise you to do.”
Another critical component of effective church security is communication. “The most important security device at any location in America is a cell phone,” says Quarles. “The welcome committee at the front or back of the church needs the 911 connection.”
Educating ushers or a security team is important, too. “Churches need to be training ushers and leaders to wear a different set of glasses, to see things through a different set of eyes,” Hanna says, “They should be walking hallways, looking for potential problems. We want them to do more than hand out bulletins and take the offering.”
If a church has multiple entrances, both Hanna and Quarles suggest locking the doors that aren’t being used during office hours and service times.
Though most security experts admit these procedures won’t ensure a church’s safety, they’ll go a long way toward deterring crime and minimizing the damage if something does go wrong.
“The bottom line,” says Hanna, “is you do the very best you can and leave the rest in God’s hands.”
Brett Lawrence is an editor at the Sun Newspapers in Naperville, Illinois, and a former youth pastor.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
