With every church shooting we all hear the mantra “You got to have a PLAN?” It’s as though a “PLAN” is some onerous piece of literary work comprised of millions of pages of processes and procedures.

I was once a managing consultant to fortune 500 companies for one of the largest disaster recovery/business continuity corporations in the world. The plans we documented were  thousands of pages consisting of months of work planning how to get huge businesses going after a major disaster such as losing a manufacturing plant or major financial institution due to natural disasters where millions of dollars of losses were measured in hours if not able to function. That’s not what we are talking about with most churches.

I hear about “Safety” committee people doing table-top “Walk-throughs” to discuss these plans to iron out the variables.

It is this mindset that scares churches into being paralyzed when it comes to “making a PLAN”.

So, what is a “PLAN” for a typical church and what does it do for you? Let’s look at a “PLAN” for some situations.

Fire emergency action plan:

1. See a fire
2. Pull the fire alarm
3. Call 911 and report the fire
4. GET OUT!

Active Shooter action plan:

1. Hear gun shots or see somebody shooting people.
2. Pull out your gun.
3. Shoot the person/persons until they are stopped from shooting anyone else.
4. Call 911 and report the shooting
5. Put your gun away.

Any questions?

Skills needed for these “PLANS”:

Fire –

1. Being able to see. – eyes needed
2. Being able to pull the fire alarm. – hand needed
3. Being able to dial 911 and speak – mouth needed
4. Being able to get out. – feet needed

Active Shooter –

1. Being able to hear or see
2. Having a gun
3. Being able to out maneuver and shoot the attacker
4. Being able to dial 911 and speak
5. Being able to reverse that action of getting your gun out

Any questions?

Next question: Which emergency requires training?

Answer: The active shooter one.

Question: Where do we get this training?

Answer: Since the last mass murder at a church (Sutherland Springs, TX) there are hundreds of “Special Forces, Navy Seals, Delta Force, Green Berets, SWAT operators” out there soliciting your business of training your “Safety Team”. So how do you pick one?

We have had hundreds of calls and emails from churches over the past few months asking what to do to develop a (in our words) SECURITY TEAM. There is more to it than jumping out of helicopters and repelling through the sky light with M4s blazing.

Here are the basic skills your team needs.

1. Use of force laws for your state.
2. Dispute resolution
3. Empty hand defensive tactics
4. Intermediate weapons
5. Handcuffing / restraints
6. Deadly force – firearms

Yes, our basic “Church Security Team” training teaches all these skills. You can certainly send your team to Texas and we will train you. We have tried to work with other trainers in other states but every time we get to talking with them they “get stars in their eyes” thinking that they are going to be millionaires over night or they advocate some weird tactics that don’t sync with our state sanctioned curriculum.

You need to realize that it is, in some respects, all about the liability. If you teach some newly developed “ground breaking” techniques the only ground breaking you will be doing is digging your company’s own grave.