With the decline in American moral values is a growing tsunami of abhorrence and violence against anyone or anything representing virtue. Our culture has gone beyond simply accepting depravity, to eagerly pursuing it. The war between good and evil is increasingly palpable. Many of the battles have been, and will be, fought in our most sacred places; faith-based ministries. The faith-based security endeavor is advancing in response. The professionalism of the endeavor is advancing as well. Faith-based security now has its own membership association for: A connected network of those truly involved instead of disconnected individuals Preserving and sharing applicable lessons learned instead of reinventing the wheel with each new plan or incident Capturing and distributing sound practices from the collective acumen of many instead of promoting the opinions of a few Discovering and disseminating genuine actionable threat information instead of recycling news Establishing meaningful benchmarking data from those actually…
2020 December
Knowing what I wanted to write about today, I prayed for good news. There it came across in my e-mail, the title was actually “GOOD NEWS.” There, in big blue bold letters at the top of the page it said, “Congratulations! You can get a $100.00 Cash App gift card!” Spam mail. Phishing. So even when we see good news, we are conditioned to be skeptical. This year more than any in my lifetime, good news was rare. I was looking in the wrong place this morning. What is good news? Gospel. To quote Britannica, “The word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon term god-spell, meaning “good story,” a rendering of the Latin evangelium and the Greek euangelion, meaning “good news” or “good telling.” [i] Good news is the bible itself, most specifically the four books associated with the word Gospel. Four simple men, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John recorded…
NOTE TO MY READERS; Last week I wrote about Dr. Perline’s work and where you can find his book. This week we are honored to hear from him directly. Thank you for your kind invitation to write a follow-up to my December presentation on “The psychology of violence.” It seems that there is never enough time to talk fully on the issues surrounding this increasingly important topic to the safety and security of our citizens, our country, and our way of life. There are several important “take-away” concepts, pertinent to violence, but per your request I would like to focus on a few of those that may be particularly pertinent to houses of worship and faith-based organizations. 1) Intentional violence is perpetrated by angry people–happy, contented people are seldom violent; I know of none! 2) Violence has been and is created by mentally ill, miscreants, and otherwise good law-abiding people…