Safety at Your House of Worship (Part One)

I started a safety ministry at my church.

I worship in a Chicago suburb. Unlike the village of Wisaka that I created for my Harry Cork crime novels, it’s a relatively quiet community. Our church is surrounded on three sides by trees and behind them are upscale homes on wooded lots. In summer particularly, it feels like we’re in a forest. Standing in the parking lot, in fact, it’s hard for me to believe we’re only a couple of blocks from a major thoroughfare and not much farther from the busy Illinois Tollway.

Our location is one reason I started thinking about protecting our property and our people. You never know who might stop by to prey.

An encounter with a wannabe-burglar helped me decide to move forward with the idea.

I was ushering one Sunday when our church administrator told us the police had notified her of some vehicle break-ins at nearby churches. Sure enough, I was standing outside the front door during the service when an unmarked white van entered the parking lot, drove slowly up and down the rows of cars, and finally stopped at the curb near me.

The individual who got out was so obviously intending to do wrong he could have had a cartoon arrow pointing at him from above with the caption: “Not here for the sermon.”

I intercepted him with a smile. He grinned back, checking me out like a vacuum cleaner salesman, and started his spiel. That digressed into a brief argument, followed by him shoving me, then him landing on the ground. We negotiated his quiet departure.

We later learned he had been banned from every other church in the village.

Other less volatile visitors appeared over the next few months: a marijuana-addled driver, a panhandler (and her “daughter”) and a crew attempting to distribute leaflets on cars. After consulting with the associate pastor, I asked a police officer member of the congregation to work with me and we formed a small group of concerned church colleagues into a safety committee. Subsequently, we added most of the congregation’s medical folks and changed our name to the Health and Safety Team.

It’s “safety” and not “security” because our mission is as much to prevent slip and falls in an icy parking lot and make sure all the kids walk, not run, through the halls as it is to keep bad people from crossing our threshold. We expect to deal more with bloody noses and diabetics needing a cup of juice than gun wielding thugs. At least, we pray we do. Thankfully, so far that’s all it’s been.

In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll give you an idea of what we’ve accomplished . . . and some ideas to consider for your own place of worship.