Religion News Service has published a piece on how churches are preparing for the possibility of gun violence in their buildings, beginning its reporting from a recent workshop in a Michigan Baptist church:
As church leaders across the country considered how to respond — to comfort their congregations but also to make them feel safe — nearly 80 people from churches across Michigan, Indiana and Illinois gathered at Prairie Baptist for the training presented by Strategos, the largest church security training ministry in the world, according to Young.
Strategos, which is affiliated with Abundant Life Church in Lee’s Summit, Mo., southeast of Kansas City, has trained more than 20,000 church leaders since 2007. But since the most recent Texas church shooting, Young said he’s been overwhelmed with requests and is filling up his schedule so quickly that one Boston church will have to wait a year for its training.
Saturday’s training was peppered with horrific details from the Texas church shooting, alarming statistics and Bible verses delivered in a call-and-response cadence familiar to many churchgoers.
The workshop happened to take place a week after the Texas church shooting, but it had been planned for some time.
When it came to the timing — a week after the Texas church shooting — [Prairie Baptist Church’s Associate Pastor John] Woullard said, “God just had that all worked out.”