Sunday morning, July 5, 2026. St. John’s Lutheran Church in Effingham, Illinois, sat peaceful under a quiet sky. Volunteers had just begun to arrive to prepare for services. Just the ordinary rhythm of a house of worship going about its day. Then a man driving a stolen car slipped inside, asking for the pastor.
Church security didn’t blink. They noticed the out-of-state plates and saw the man approach. Safety team members made contact as he entered. The man asked for the pastor, but the safety volunteers sensed something was wrong. They called 911.
Police rolled in. There was a struggle. A gun was produced. One shot was fired. From the details it sounds like it might have been an attempted suicide. Either way, the intruder went down with life-threatening wounds. A few days later, he died of his injuries.
Thankfully no innocents were hit. No blood on the pews. No parents clawing through wreckage crying out for their kids. The pastor lived. Tragedy was averted, prevented by extraordinary vigilance.
Breathe easy? Not quite. Close your eyes and run the other reel.
Unlocked side doors. Nobody watching the parking lot or the doors. No radios calling out warnings. Chaos explodes where hymns should rise. Gunfire shatters stained glass and the pastor and others go down. Children scream from the daycare area. Paramedics arrive to heartbreak. A community is gutted, forever asking, “Why didn’t we see it coming?”
That nightmare is one lazy policy choice away. Churches aren’t fortresses, they’re sanctuaries. Open doors, welcoming smiles, coffee and cookies. But evil doesn’t check the welcome sign. It walks right in.
FBI patterns show Sundays hosted the most active shooter incidents than any other day in 2022. It shouldn’t surprise that Sundays reliably top the day for the most violent religious activity incidents pretty much every year. Barely half of Protestant churches have a real plan for such horrors.
Researching this, I initially found the number of churches with “church safety” as higher, but that’s because researchers counted the 21% of houses of worship with “No Firearms” policies as among those with safety programs. “Gun-Free Zone” signs have no preventative or survival value.
The rest? Hoping and praying. Winging it. That’s not faith. That’s playing Russian roulette with your flock.
Picture the mom dropping her little ones at children’s ministry, trusting you’ve got their backs. The widow finding peace in the back pew. The young family singing together. They come seeking refuge, not risk. Your church’s safety team’s job is to make sure they find it.
This is where preparation becomes love in action. Start with brutal honesty beginning with a vulnerability walk-through. Treat your parking lot like the front line that it is. Trouble announces itself there first, as Effingham proved.
Eyes on the lot, radios in hands, cameras rolling (especially when weather hides threats or makes time outside miserable, especially in winter cold). Lock or man every door. One welcoming entrance. Tight control at kids’ areas.
Layer it like the pros recommend. The DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—the feds’ infrastructure defenders—pushes exactly this: outer perimeter watch, middle access controls, inner sanctuary safeguards.
Equip a real team. Safety side for deterrence and response. Vetted folks with good heads, not untrained folks who shoot 30 rounds every five years. Or worse yet, those who have never received an ounce of training and who don’t practice. When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Recruit everyone you can with a medical background. That side of the safety plan will respond fifty times more often for everything from anxiety attacks to heart attacks. Falls happen far more often than violence.
Radios with clear codes allow instant, discrete communications. A visible presence that says “not today” to bad guys without scaring the saints. Train like lives depend on it because they do. Drills. Tabletops. De-escalation. Stop-the-bleed kits ready, right next to the AEDs.
The Effingham team didn’t turn their church into a bunker. They simply refused to be caught flat-footed. That’s the difference between headlines that heal and the ones that haunt.
We live in a broken world. Evil doesn’t take Sundays off, but neither does a prepared shepherd. Church members and visitors walk through those doors carrying real burdens—divorces, diagnoses, doubts and life struggles. The minimum you owe them is a safe place to lay those burdens down.
Don’t wait for the knock that comes too late. Assess your risks today. Build that team. Lock those doors. Watch that parking lot. Train like tomorrow depends on it. Because for someone in your pews, or your pastor, it just might.
The flock is counting on you. Be the sanctuary they deserve.
“Researching this, I initially found the number of churches with “church safety” as higher, but that’s because researchers counted the 21% of houses of worship with ‘No Firearms’ policies as among those with safety programs. ‘Gun-Free Zone’ signs have no preventative or survival value.”
‘No Firearms’ policies and ‘Gun-Free Zone’ signs give a mentally ill killer just what they want – an area full of defenseless people. This is what the anti-gun call ‘safety’ – an area that is essentially a death trap with an imaginary fantasy ‘force field’ of ‘No Firearms’ policies and ‘Gun-Free Zone’ signs that specifically attracts mentally ill killers who, unlike the complaint people occupying the area, don’t comply with ‘No Firearms’ policies and ‘Gun-Free Zone’ signs.
A good resource for this topic is “Security Planning for Holy Places” (2026) by Stephen Bryen, a long-time security strategy professional.
My church as a paid armed off duty officer in the lobby for every service. We have greeters (some armed) engaging with everyone coming in, and all off duty and retired LEOs are encouraged to carry concealed when they attend. We also have several active and retired paramedics who attend services, and a stocked med bag centrally located. I also carry an IFAK kit. I like to think we’re pretty well prepared without making the church seem like a fortress.
The church I attend now and a former, larger PCA church home both had active security plans with armed, competent members and secured classrooms and doors. But I’m in the South so it probably was easier to implement (years ago!).
“Gun free” zones are as sensible as pixie dust.
Zones
Same for dances. Dances are one of the most attacked venues, right up there with churches and shopping malls.
Bill Ayres got his start attacking dance venues attended by soldiers. Ditto for Islamic terrorism in the west, when Gaddafi attacked dance venues in Germany.
Bataclan, the Ariana Grande concert, and here on the US, the pulse nightclub, plus that shooting in Chicago that was part of the spree of eco-communist shooters, following the self-declared eco-communist who shot up the Mosque in Christchurch New Zealand.
The Eco communists in the US were the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Morgan Hill garlic festival shooter, and maybe the Atlanta shopping mall shooter, plus there was another one recently with an eco-fascist manifesto, claiming to be following the Christchurch Mosque shooter.
A country bar dance venue got shot up just north of LA a few years ago, and someone shot up two Ballroom Dance venues in LA.
It’s hard for Dancers to go armed in the US because most states don’t allow arms in drinking establishments, and a lot of dance venues serve drinks. (Partner Dancers don’t drink, since those dances require high functioning, but there’s still a fair amount of partner dancing In places that serve drinks.)
Keeping guns out of drinking establishments is totally backwards. In pro-gun states a lot of the patrons have guns locked in their cars, and the bloody minded people know it. They get mad, they go out to the care and get their guns, and they have a nice defender-free zone where they can kill a lot of people with nobody being able to shoot back.
There should be no defender free zones. Prisons and courtrooms can maybe have sufficient defenders while disarming the law abiding citizenry, but we should try to as far as possible reduce the number of public places that don’t have citizen defenders.
Convicted and imprisoned left winger neo-nazi racist church mass-shooter Dylan Roof on death row somehow needed ‘clemency’ per Biden admin left wing pardon attorney and deserved mercy because the murderer had anxiety…
[Biden] Government Fumbled Dylan Roof’s Background Check, Now Argues For Mercy.
(Colion) “The same government that fumbled Dylan Roof’s background check and allowed him to buy the gun he used to murder nine people in a Charleston church later had a pardon attorney put in writing that he deserved mercy.
Why?
Because he had anxiety.
That is the part that should stop everyone cold.
Dylan Roof sat inside a Bible study for an hour while nine people welcomed him in, then murdered them in cold blood because of the color of their skin.
And yet, according to Senator Josh Hawley’s questioning of Biden pardon attorney Liz Oyer, a government memo said Roof was not a compelling candidate for clemency — but still recommended it anyway.
That tells you everything.
These are the same people who lecture law-abiding gun owners about background checks, loopholes, universal checks, and why the government needs more control over who can own a firearm.
But in Charleston, the system they want you to trust already had its chance.
The background check flagged Dylan Roof.
Then human error kicked in.
The wrong agency was contacted.
The disqualifying information was missed.
And he walked out with the gun.
So follow the chain:
The government failed the background check.
The government blamed the gun.
Then the government argued for mercy for the killer.
That is not public safety.
That is a system that fails in every direction except the one that targets law-abiding people.
They keep selling you the same trade:
Give up more freedom, and they’ll keep you safe.
Charleston shows what that trade actually buys.
They failed the victims at the counter.
Then someone in that same system put sympathy for Dylan Roof on paper.
You are your own first responder.
They keep proving it.
In writing.”
ht* tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YtuiMwjQ8I
The notion of a significant armed security plan is great if you have the headcount.
My church rarely has more than 55 people in a service and most of them are too feeble or elderly to be armed effectively for self-defense. Of the minority that are not too feeble or elderly, the overwhelming majority would never tool-up. End result: we will be extremely fortunate if just one person is armed for self-defense–and even then he/she will very likely NOT be positioned to be effective. Of course a significant security plan is out of the question simply because there are not enough people to implement one.