This week’s article is a question by FBSN member J.A. Next week will be an answer from another FBSN member. Here is J’s story. About a year ago, I shared challenges my church has faced in dealing with disturbing behavior by congregants. Recent events caused me to revisit this topic. An elderly man – I’ll call him “Bob,” has attended my church intermittently. He comes for a few months, disappears a year or two, then returns. He distributes handwritten flyers around town to anyone who will take them. The last time he disappeared was after our pastors met with him and told him to cease and desist with the flyer distribution. Why? Because he had written the name of our church on the flyers and outlined our churches’ doctrine of polygamy. The problem is, our church does not practice, teach, believe, promote, or preach polygamy. Prior to this, I had…
2023 January
For the first time in three years, today’s TAI will be longer than 400 words. There is just a lot to process with this report. Last week I mentioned the story that significantly influenced the DFI (Deadly Force Incident) research. Kristen French didn’t attend the church where she was abducted while walking through the parking lot. It occurred on a Thursday while nothing was going on at the church. Her abductors were a normal looking husband and wife. No firearms were involved. Those things illustrate the need to evaluate statistics correctly to capture the most critical things for any security program to consider. Let’s unpack some of the data and summarize it into actionable strategies. The following statistics are gathered from 21 complete years of studying the most violent situations connected to faith-based organizations (FBO’s) in the U.S. The complete data can be found and downloaded at https://fbsnamerica.com/deadly-force-statistics. At the…
Last week the FBSN released the updated Deadly Force Incident (DFI) study of the worst of all faith-based related violence in the U.S. That information now captures data from 21 years of learning from the 2,183 incidents in the study. It is not just numbers. It is an effort to help us get better at protection. This week I want to document the history of the study, in the 2nd of 3 parts of that release. In 1996, I began writing a book about security in faith-based organizations (Evil Invades Sanctuary was published in 2012). To establish a baseline confirmation of the need, I researched crime at ministries. A surprise emerged in that research, in how many of those incidents had violent deaths, or the potential for such associated with them. The quantity of such attacks was undocumented, so I developed methods of tracking. National news stories would break regarding some…