Posted: 2/02/08

Prophetic preaching breaks down
barriers, builds up God’s kingdom

By Jennifer Harris and Ken Camp

Word & Way and Baptist Standard

ATLANTA—Breaking down barriers, healing the hurting, challenging Christians to transcend categories of “us and them” and announcing the coming kingdom of God are just a few of the roles prophetic preachers must fill, according to speakers at a Baptist preaching conference.

Four preachers representative of varied traditions delivered sermons during a seminar on prophetic preaching held in conjunction with the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta, Feb. 1.

While other children played house, Joan Parrott and her brothers grew up playing church. The 54-year-old executive minister of University Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., fought to be the one to sit in the center chair of their makeshift sanctuary and preach.

Even as a child, she struggled with the texts from which she preached. One such experience as preacher led her to Matthew 15:21-28, in which a woman pleads with Jesus for mercy and asks him to heal her daughter.

“I struggled with the text,” Parrott said. “I couldn’t understand why Jesus calls the woman a dog. The Jesus we knew fed the 5,000, plus women and children. He came to Mary and Martha—even when they thought he was late to heal Lazarus. The Jesus we knew had compassion.”

The word “dog” referred to the fact that the woman was not a Jew, Parrott explained. The woman was considered a heathen—a Canaanite.

“Some things don’t happen in our lives until we get desperate enough,” she said. “She’s not a part of the church; she is a woman coming out in a man’s world and has the audacity to ask Jesus for help.”

Jesus says nothing initially in the story.

“We’ve got some serious problems, but Jesus says nothing,” said Parrott, alluding to social problems in today’s world. “When we are pushed to the limit and have nothing to lose, we will speak truth to power regardless of consequence. She had nothing to lose, but she was going to move past the silence of God.”

Parrott suggests Jesus was waiting to see what the disciples would do—just as he is waiting to see what we will do now.

“You have a responsibility to make the world a better place,” said Parrott. “Many of us who want to do social justice—feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner—we are afraid. The Lord seems to be silent. This woman moves past all fear, moves past the tradition of her time. She falls on her knees with everything in her and worships him.”

“There is a ‘yes’ that goes beyond your understanding, statistics, agenda, denomination, social-economic status,” said Parrott. “Lord, I don’t understand. I don’t know the protocol. All I know is I have a need, and I need you to touch it. If I’m a dog, I’m your dog. Give me what the children don’t want.”

God is waiting for people to drop their prejudices and barriers—those things that isolate people from each other.

“The quintessential yes means I have the power to go into the world,” Parrott said. “Jesus sees you and wants you to say, ‘Yes!’”

“When barriers fall which have separated the people of God for a long time, there is excitement in heaven,” said James Forbes, founding president of Healing of the Nations Foundation and retired professor of homiletics at Union Theological Seminary and Auburn Theological Seminary in New York.

“God blesses such convocations with special grace. So the Spirit comes. Do you feel it? Have you felt it walking up and down these halls? You’ve almost feel like singing, ‘There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.’”

Forbes warned that the Holy Spirit is much too efficient to use a gathering like the New Baptist Covenant “just for congratulations for past duties.” Instead, God will use the time to share what is on God’s heart.

“When God gets mad about something—or you would prefer provoked, right? Upset. When God’s heart is pulsing with an extraordinary urging to do something about what is insulting to God, if you’re not careful—a prophet! Out of nowhere, God comes,” Forbes said.

From the beginning, God has invested in having his children be whole and well, Forbes said. The human body is even designed with an immune system to help keep it healthy.

“My ministry isn’t just about talking, it’s about healing,” he said. “When you get it, you’re supposed to pass it on.”

Instead of healing being the specialty of select individuals or denominations, every child of God is a healer, Forbes emphasized. “You got healing powers inside yourself. If you don’t use the power to heal somebody else, that same power will make you sick. That’s why there is so much division, so much separation.”

“Look around,” said Forbes, instructing everyone in attendance to raise their hands. “All of these hands can go back home and begin to heal.”

But for healing and wholeness to happen, people must move beyond categories of “us and them,” said George Mason, pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas.

“There are two kinds of people in the world—those who view the glass as half-full and those who see it as half-empty. There are two kinds of people, said Robert Frost—those who are willing to work, and those who are willing to let them. There are two kinds of people—the ones who suck the life out of every day, and the ones who let the day suck the life out of them. …There are two kinds of people in your church—those who agree with you and the bigots.

“OK, you get the idea. It could go on and on. But that’s also the problem. Any time you go down that trail of dividing up the world into two kinds of people, it goes on and on.”

The underlying problem with “us and them” is that “it starts to sound a lot more like us versus them,” Mason said.

The division of people into clear-cut categories leads far too easily to armed conflict, as in the United States’ occupation of Iraq, he asserted.

“We are the good; they are the bad. We are the righteous; they are the unrighteous. We are the do-gooders; they are the evildoers. We are told that nations are either with us or with our enemies—us against them,” he said. “Isn’t this just a mirror image of the very thinking of those who flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings?”

“We questioning whether Islam is a religion of peace. Perhaps we, as Christians, ought to be asking ourselves if others can believe by our witness whether Christianity is a religion of peace.”

Evil must be acknowledged and confronted, Mason said. The challenge Christians face is to “oppose evil utterly without disposing of the people under its sway.”

The kingdom of God—where the lion and the lamb live together in peace and there is no division of “us and them”—is both a present reality and a future hope, said Julius Scruggs, pastor of First Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala.

“We pray for the ideal in the face of the real,” Scruggs said. “We behold what is while we work and pray for what ought to be.”

God’s kingdom—the rule and reign of God in the lives of people—became a present reality in Jesus Christ, he insisted. “The kingdom is in our midst—a present reality.”

But not all recognize God’s rule or obey his reign, so in a real sense, the kingdom remains a yet-to-be-fulfilled future hope, he added.

“Even in the local church, the kingdom of God has not come in fullness,” he said. “We are afflicted with Burger King theology. We want to have it our way, not God’s way.”

Posted: 2/02/08

Panelists urge New Covenant
Baptists to fight institutional racism

By Bob Allen

EthicsDaily.com

ATLANTA—The church’s struggle against racism no longer is primarily about skin color but about institutions that bestow privilege on some and penalties on others, an activist, denominational leader and scholar said in a special-interest session Friday at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta.

“While I applaud the organizers of our event in coming together and asking the question of how do we move forward beyond race, I think the real challenge for us is to deal with that insidious cancer that is within the very fabric of our society, that I would term racism,” said Aidsand Wright-Riggins, executive director of National Ministries, American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A.

Wright-Riggins, who is African-American, said there is room to discuss issues of multiculturalism and diversity.

“I think that’s a wonderful thing that we need to be engaged in,” he said, but he added, “I think that we need to realize that here in the United States of America we still live in very much a racialized society.”

About 10 percent of white children in the U.S. live in poverty, he said. That compares to 27 percent of Native American children, 28 percent of Latino children and 33 percent of African-American youth.

“There seems to be a correlation between social policies and race in this country,” he said.

Looking to the plight of African-American men with regard to issues of criminal and racial justice, Wright-Riggins noted there are more black young men in prisons than in colleges and universities.

Miguel De La Torre, associate professor of social ethics and director of the Justice and Peace Institute at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo., said it isn’t enough for white churches to want to diversify.

“What is the best advice that can be given to white ministers wishing to diversify their churches?” De La Torre asked. “No church should consider diversifying unless they first get saved.”

“That is, the congregation as a whole must crucify their sin upon the cross of Jesus Christ,” he explained. “They must nail their white supremacy and class privilege on the cross so that they can become a new creature in Christ. Becoming a new creature in Christ is not to be taken figuratively but literally.”

Forcing the issue without first dismantling societal and institutional forms of segregation that still exist, De La Torre said, “will reduce diversity to tokenism.”

“Centuries of normalizing and legitimizing segregation cannot merely be washed away within a generation because those in power had an ‘ah-hah’ moment,” he said. “Such a proposition would only continue the arrogance of those who confuse their power with the power of God.”

Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, a faith-based organization that works on criminal-justice reform, identified a new form of racism “based on color blindness and normalcy of whiteness” that he calls the “New Jim Crow.”

Bean said the new Jim Crow accepts people of color as long as they can assimilate to white attitudes, traditions and speaking patterns. While the old Jim Crow applied everyone but whites, he said, the new Jim Crow is cut from a different cloth.

“It is a reality that does not impact all people of color the same way, like the old Jim Crow did,” he said. “If you were black you were black, and the Jim Crow regime applied to you. When we talk about the new Jim Crow, we are basically talking about low economic people, people who have not been able to make the jump to our high-tech, highly educated society.”

“If you want to see the new Jim Crow in action, you go down to your local county courthouse and you see who is on the docket,” Bean said. “They will be overwhelmingly people of color. They will be overwhelmingly poor, and they will be overwhelmingly people who have problems with mental illness.”

Bean, a white American Baptist minister credited with bringing international attention to a civil-rights case in a small Louisiana town known worldwide as the Jena 6, said the thousands of people who demonstrated in Jena last fall were 99 percent black and appeared to be mostly middle class. Lacking cell-phone reception, Bean circulated among the throngs and asked people why they were there.

“Every person said, ‘Well I have this brother,’ ‘I have this grandchild’ or ‘I have this niece or nephew who got caught up in the criminal justice system like these boys in Jena, and enough is enough,” Bean said.

“When I looked at the way white America and black America have responded to Jena, I realize that there is a huge perception gap on issues of race and fairness and the problem in the criminal justice system that we need to start talking about,” Bean said. “And we need to start talking about it in the context of faith.”

Posted: 2/02/08

Separation of church & state can be complex,
but it’s worth the effort, speakers insist

By Robert Marus

ATLANTA (ABP)—Although often difficult to negotiate, drawing the proper line between church and state is worth it for both institutions, according to experts in the topic.

A panel of religious-liberty advocates addressed a small-group session of the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant Feb. 1. They said that religious is Baptists’ birthright—but that the church-state separation that protects religious freedom is imperiled and need Baptists’ advocacy.

“Whether we have a wall or a zone or a rickety fence or whatever, we must continue to have at least a strand or two of barb-wire to keep the institutions of religion from cozying up to the institutions of government,” said James Dunn, a professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School..”

While some evangelicals promote the idea that the separation of church and state is a “myth,” Dunn said, there are four reasons why it is not.

The church and the state should be separate because both have separate constituencies, separate purposes, separate sources of funding and separate methodologies, he said.

“The Constitution is indeed godless, thank goodness!” said Dunn, who is also the retired executive director of the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

But drawing proper lines between church and state can be difficult for Baptists, according to Jeffrey Haggray, executive director-minister of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention. Baptists, in particular, sometimes have difficulty defending their birthright because of other strong characteristics of their own tradition.

“Our prophetic tendencies give rise to activism—activism within the public square,” he said. Due to that tendency, he noted, Baptists can sometimes succumb to the temptation to involve themselves in electioneering from the pulpit.

Second, Haggray said, “Baptists are missional people,” and as a result start ministries and social programs that politicians point to as models for the delivery of social services. In recent years, political leaders at the state and federal levels have attempted to change laws to allow churches and other houses of worship to receive government funding for such services.

Finally, he added, Baptists have a strong evangelical strain and “we love to share the good news about Jesus Christ—and that evangelical strand gives rise to strong preferences in the public arena for the Christian faith.”

But all three temptations ultimately hurt the church if indulged, Haggray said.

While prophetic preaching is important in calling the state to account—Haggray noted that a Baptist preacher from Atlanta and his ministerial colleagues fomented the Civil Rights Movement along—Haggray said giving in to partisan politics actually causes Christians to forfeit their prophetic role.

“When we align ourselves and our credibility and influence” with one political party or candidate, he said, the entanglement that ensues can cause the church of Jesus Christ to end up appearing like just another special-interest group. “Ultimately our credibility and influence are more important than any one endorsement.”

Posted: 2/02/08

Medical professionals urge
congregational health advocacy

By Brian Kaylor

Baptist General Convention of Missouri

ATLANTA—Medical professionals explained how the biblical calling to take care of the sick could be met by churches offering medical treatment and information Feb. 1 during a New Baptist Covenant special interest session titled “Reaching Out to the Sick.”

Offering advice, resources, contacts and a strong challenge, panelists addressed the health needs of people and how churches can help.

Retired physician Drayton Sanders outlined the problems he sees with the current medical system and ways that churches could be part of the solution. He charged that the medical field has turned from being a calling—as it was for him—to a business.

He cited a litany of medical problems that include rising costs; lack of access to care for 15 percent of Americans, 80 percent of them in working families; a lack of fairness as medical costs are shifted from uninsured to insured; and ineffectiveness as a result of declining patient choice, increase in demand and a shortage of healthcare workers.

Sanders briefly argued for some form of universal healthcare system to ensure that “no one is left out.” He noted that strong resistance to the notion from businesses and legislators—along with an apathetic public—makes such proposals unlikely. He urged churches to help fill the void by voting and lobbying for medical reform and through congregational health advocacy.

Sanders pointed to the Parish Nurse Program, where a church staffer or volunteer leads the effort in caring for the congregation. This approach combines the physical with the spiritual in order to provide holistic care.

Sanders argued that church health advocates should teach wellness to their congregants, serve as an advocate by providing resources and information about medical issues and options, and train home caregivers. Sanders also urged churches to view the health advocate as a minister instead of support staff because of the strong connection between the physical and spiritual.

Finally, Sanders suggested that churches should set up free clinics to help “the underserved in the community.” Although clinics can be complicated and expensive, he said, they provide an opportunity “to serve out what God has called us to do—to minister to others” and “to bring others to Jesus.” When people are sick, they are often more receptive to the gospel than usual, he added.

Other panelists echoed the call by Sanders for church health advocates to provide resources and assistance on important health issues.

LaRue Wilson, a certified nurse, emphasized the importance of helping church members understand Medicare, Medicaid and other programs. She suggested that congregation have a “church nurse” who can educate the members about the medical process and options.

To help answer questions and provide resources for those present at the panel, Wilson introduced Judy Weaver and Maxine Turnipseed, both health insurance specialists with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They noted the importance of working with churches and other faith-based organizations to make information on Medicaid and Medicare available to more people.

Physician Fred Loper, executive director of the Baptist Medical Dental Fellowship, told how churches can offer free clinics and encouraged attendees to pick up information.

Posted: 2/02/08

Time in God’s presence primary
requirement for spiritual discipline

By Jim White

Religious Herald

ATLANTA—When it comes to spiritual discipline, simply spending time in God’s presence is the primary requirement, seminary professors Linda Bryan and Loyd Allen agreed.

Bryan and Allen led a session titled “The Spirit of the Lord Upon Me” during the New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta, Feb. 1.

The session relied on the central scriptural theme of the three-day celebration taken from Luke 4:18-19 as its springboard. Jesus, speaking to his hometown neighbors, began his inaugural message with the words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me.”

Allen, who teaches church history and spiritual formation at the MacAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, emphasized that Baptists of this age need to rediscover the spiritual disciplines that create Christ-likeness.

“Baptists tend to run before they are sent,” he said. “Prayer is the personal communication with the divine.”

Bryan emphasized “developing a familiar friendship with Christ” through meditation and contemplation.

Prayer must spring from one’s own voice according to Bryan. “Prayer is the time we take to sit with God. …We have too many cookie-cutter prayers” she said.

Allen alluded to the Protestant Reformation as the point in church history when the practice of contemplation and meditation was abandoned in the tradition from which Baptists sprang.

“But the soul and body are one” he declared.

Spiritual formation impacts body as well as spirit. Each professor emphasized reading the Scriptures and praying with imagination, placing one’s self in the Scriptures.

“The text draws us into the context,” Bryan said.

Authentic prayer is the kind “that leads one to do what a Christian is supposed to do,” Allen said. It leads to “solitude, silence and simplicity.”

Touching on fasting as an expectation of Christ when he said “whenever you fast….” in Matt. 6:16, Bryan said it is a discipline that takes time and can be done in a variety of ways. “Food is not the only deprivation that creates spiritual awareness.”

Posted: 2/02/08

Program enables watershed
experience for seminary students

By Bob Perkins

ATLANTA—A program endowed by a $100,000 gift from Oklahoma Baptist Robert Stephenson has ensured that seminary students from around the nation could participate in the historic celebration of the New Baptist Covenant.

The Stephenson Seminary Scholars program helped underwrite the participation of 178 seminary students from 16 different divinity schools.

Bailey Nelson, the program’s coordinator, said her involvement has been an inspiration.

“I am overwhelmed by the diversity of the group and the passion they show,” Nelson said. “They are driven and hungry. Their big question is: What’s next?”

Nelson said the meeting has been a watershed moment for many members of the group who are beginning to understand their role as Baptists.

“We can’t wait for others to tell us what to do. It’s time for us to decide for ourselves,” she said. “It’s not about becoming members of the power structure; it’s about developing relationships.”

Because there had been no contact among the seminarians prior to this week, Nelson said the students are exploring ways to keep in touch after the event. “There’s been talk about starting a Facebook group to stay connected with each other through e-mail, and there are others who are talking about collaborating on a book.”

Derrick Sellars, who attends Shaw Divinity School in Raleigh, N.C., said the program has helped students from different backgrounds share experiences.

“It really forces us to deal with what we’ve been trying to hide for many years,” he said. “There was a time when black people weren’t allowed to go to seminary. This gives us the opportunity to find out what others are teaching and maybe we are learning what we should be teaching seminary students.”

“It helps us to learn the intellectual side of what it means to be Baptist,” Shaw said. “I think some of us don’t even know what Baptists believe. Yes, we submerge believers in water, but it’s much deeper than that.”

Angelita Clifton, who attends Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J., shared Shaw’s excitement about the Baptist identity.

“I think we will be bringing back the tools for us to share with our congregations what it means to be Baptist, and to be more aware of the Baptist identity,” Clifton said. “I came here with the idea that I was going to learn something from this once-in-a-lifetime gathering of Baptists.

“It’s much easier to think that we are all somehow different,” she said. “But when we come together to exchange ideas and theology, we find out that we don’t have to agree on everything to be able to work together on common goals. We are unified under the umbrella of God’s love.”

Posted: 2/02/08

Biblical witness commands God’s
people to ‘welcome the stranger’

By Patricia Heys

Cooperative Baptist Fellowship

ATLANTA—Professors Daniel Carro and Richard Wilson drew on biblical examples as they discussed immigration issues at a special interest session “Welcoming the Stranger” Feb. 1 at the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta.

“Our question today is who is a stranger,” said Carro, as he showed the audience of more than 90 people a diverse array of faces. “If you can’t define who is a stranger, you can’t define who you should welcome. And friends, I presume that all of us are strangers. Each of us is a stranger to someone else. In the wrong place, in the wrong moment you become a stranger, refugee, alien, non-entity, intruder, immigrant, trespasser, [and an] outlander.”

Carro, a professor of divinity at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in Arlington, Va., immigrated to the United States from Argentina in 2000 and will be eligible for U.S. citizenship next month.

“God’s concern for strangers is rooted in the fact that strangers do not possess the typical rights and privileges afforded to other members of the community,” Carro said. “This is why they are vulnerable and why God wants to take care of them.

“Today strangers are not just ignored, they are actively isolated,” Carro said. “Sometimes worse—we build fences and barriers to separate some groups of people from others. Why do we do that? Wasn’t one of the greatest events of our time the falling of the Berlin Wall? We applauded the falling of the Berlin Wall, but now we build walls.

“But the worst wall is not of concrete. The worst wall is a wall of hostility. If we don’t tear down the walls of hostility, other walls will come. In immigration, the biggest battle we face is an internal battle. We need to tear down in our hearts. There is no need for walls. What are we going to do—hostility or hospitality? The choice is ours.”

Wilson, a professor of theology at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., met Carro in 1984 while on sabbatical in Argentina. He also provided biblical examples, citing the Old Testament story of Sarah and Abraham welcoming a stranger in their tent, the disciples meeting a stranger on the road to Emmaus and the woman anointing Jesus’ feet.

“I encourage you to think with me today what a theology of hospitality might sound like, but what more importantly what it might look like,” Wilson said. “A theology of hospitality is, first, a theology of doing and, second, a reflection of what has been done, with the hope that we find God is our midst.”

Wilson, a member of the First Baptist Church of Christ in Macon, Ga., provided examples of how his church has reached out to immigrants in their local community. For 20 years, the church provided space for a Korean congregation. Members also teach conversational English classes.

“The surprise of welcoming the stranger is that you find yourself on the receiving end of the welcome,” Wilson said. “It takes two to give a hug. To reach out to a stranger is to open yourself to the reciprocal hug.”

Former President Jimmy Carter, who attended the session with his wife, Rosalynn, said that in his small hometown of Plains, Ga., there are 80 to 85 immigrants.

“What we really need out of this session is some very tangible and specific recommendations on what participants, individuals, congregations and this entire body of Baptists can do once we return home,” Carter said. “The totality of our collective voice speaking out on behalf of undocumented workers would be very powerful.”

Posted: 1/31/08

Christians called to tear down walls,
not build them, South Texas pastor says

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

ATLANTA—Christ came to tear down walls that divide people, a South Texas pastor told Baptists at a prophetic preaching conference. So, he asked, can Christians find any real security in a fence built along an “imaginary line” to separate two nations?

“Jesus didn’t come to build walls. He didn’t come to build fences. He came to tear them down,” said Ellis Orozco, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in McAllen.

Orozco participated in an afternoon session on prophetic preaching during the celebration of a New Baptist Covenant in Atlanta, Jan. 31, offering a biblical response to illegal immigration.

“I live on the border,” Orozco said. “But then again, who doesn’t live on the border these days? The border keeps moving. We don’t cross the border anymore. The border crosses us.”

While they speak of a fence as a way of securing the nation’s borders, the unspoken reason many people support the building of a barrier along the United States’ southern border is because they fear “the browning of America,” he said.

For generations of poor males in Mexico, answering “the call to head north” to help support their families has become a rite of passage, Orozco said. Desperation drives them across the border, he insisted.

“We always call 1-800-MEXICO when we need more poor people to do work we don’t want to do,” he said. “Who do you think is rebuilding New Orleans? For that matter, who do you think is going to build the fence?”

The Spirit of Christ compels Christians to look at the immigration situation differently, Orozco insisted.

“Jesus comes to us in the eyes of the stranger,” he said.

Walls and fences alienate and separate people, dividing them into “us and them, in and out,” he said. But Jesus alone possesses power to do the impossible and “make the two one,” Orozco said.

Undocumented Mexican immigrants “are not the enemy who have come to take from us,” he insisted. “They are the neighbor who has come to help and to be helped.”

Some may quote an American poet who said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Orozco offered a rejoinder to that assertion: “I know Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is a good friend of mine. And Robert Frost is no Jesus Christ.”

American treatment of Mexican workers and reaction to immigration from Mexico has caused “a loss of moral authority in the global community,” he asserted. Every nation has the right to secure its borders from attack, but walls do not contribute to peace or promote security, Orozco said.

“As long as there are walls, there will never be peace,” he said.

Posted: 1/30/08

Church security demands all hands on deck
–but maybe not with arms

By Ken Camp

Managing Editor

FORT WORTH—Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth has employed personnel to patrol its campus, escort women to their cars after dark and ensure buildings are locked since before Russ Hibner became the church’s facilities manager seven years ago.

But after a security guard stopped a gunman who entered a Colorado Springs church in December, leaders at Travis Avenue Baptist decided to take another look at how it provides security.

“We’re in transition,” Hibner said.

In recent weeks, the church secured training for its courtesy patrol to enable them to become certified noncommissioned security officers. As noncommissioned security officers, they are trained in how to handle emergencies and to understand the scope of their authority, but they are not permitted to carry deadly weapons. For occasions when the church believes armed personnel are needed, it hires off-duty police officers, Hibner explained.

“We have to weigh a lot of factors and seek a balance,” he said. “We want to provide a service for our members and guests without going overboard and making it an armed camp.”

Just by their presence, the courtesy patrol probably has deterred some criminal acts, Hibner noted. Personnel routinely patrol parking lots in vehicles with flashing lights, and on more than one occasion, small groups have “dispersed quickly” when the vehicles came into sight, he said.

Although security officers will not carry guns, they do carry direct-connect radios that enable them to contact other staff or call 911 in case of an emergency that requires professional assistance.

Ambulance service and police have responded promptly when summoned, Hibner noted, and police cars often use the church’s parking lot as a gathering spot at night.

“We’ve very happy about that, and we tell them they can use our parking lot any time they want to,” he said.

In addition to the security officers and off-duty police, a parking committee helps provide additional parking lot security during worship services, and the church also instructs ushers and deacons how to handle minor disturbances during worship services.

All churches should train ushers to recognize potential security problems, said Phill Martin from the National Association of Church Business Administration.

“They should be the first line of defense,” he said. “The day of ushers just handing out bulletins is long past. They need to be trained in what to watch for. They need to understand if something looks suspicious, it may be. A church should have procedures in place to help ushers know how to respond.”

Church staff members periodically should ask a series of “what if” questions to prepare for a variety of security-related issues, Martin suggested.

“We highly recommend church staffs do scenario planning” where they think through proper responses to various situations, he said.

At Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, armed off-duty police officers patrol the facility on Sundays and Wednes-days, but they aren’t necessarily the only people carrying weapons, according to Senior Associate Pastor Ken Warren.

Paid uniformed officers work in the parking lot with both traffic flow and security, and they are present in the sanctuary when the offering is collected to escort the ushers from the worship center to the church’s safe.

Their presence is augmented by a significant number of law enforcement officers who worship at the church and stand to respond in emergencies as members of Green Acres’ security ministry team, Warren said.

“They are required to be armed even when they are off-duty,” he said. “So, they may be sitting up in the choir or in the congregation, but they are alert and prepared to respond as needed at a moment’s notice.”

Posted: 1/30/08

What should worshippers do
if their church is attacked?

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

NEW YORK (ABP)—Last December, worshippers at a Colorado church lost two members to a murderous shooter. In 2006, a man entered an Oregon church and threw fuel during a Sunday service, intending to set the building ablaze. And in 2005, a man opened fire in a Wisconsin church, killing seven people and wounding four others.

In this day and age, even elementary schools are better prepared to deal with violent attacks than churches, experts say, because church-goers think it won’t happen to them. But that false sense of security gives physical and psychological advantages to any would-be attacker.

There are two main reasons churches are attacked, according to Rick Schaber, risk control manager for Church Mutual Insurance Company in Merrill, Wis.

“First, worship centers are open to the public, so gaining access is extremely easy,” he said. “Second, people are passionate about their faith. When someone wants to take extreme action against their church, oftentimes, it isn’t difficult.”

Most risk experts say worshippers have five options when threatened by a shooter.

• Escape. Experts say the first choice for anyone in a threatening situation is to escape. Churches should develop plans that determine how people will leave the building and where they will meet afterward (buddy systems work well for people with disabilities). Security teams should highlight escape routes and assign people to ensure everyone gets out.

In Colorado Springs, Colo., Pastor Brady Boyd lost two church members when a man with a gun entered his church. But the New Life Church security team quickly activated a crisis plan that helped people escape.

“People were ushered off the campus or taken to safe places,” Boyd said in a press conference the next day. “We had security details in each of those locations to keep people safe.”

• Lock down. “Lockdowns are designed to be exercised when the threat is outside of the building or outside a specific room,” Schaber said. “It’s designed to prohibit the person from entering an area.”

For example, a safety newsletter from Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company noted, the killer on the Virginia Tech campus didn’t take the time to force his way through locked doors—he looked instead for easy targets.

See related articles: • The security of the believer: Protecting churches from attack • Church security demands all hands on deck–but maybe not with arms • What should worshippers do if their church is attacked?

Ideally, all church rooms should have locks on them, and children’s areas should be secured by one entrance that teachers can quickly lock, protecting everyone inside.

• Hide. If escape and lockdown are not possible, hiding under tables or chairs can reduce vertical targets for a potential killer, safety consultant John Nicoletti said in the Brotherhood Mutual letter.

• Play dead. “This is one of the more difficult options. It requires people to have already been shot, and you have to really look dead,” Nicoletti said. But at times, it has been effective.

• Confront the killer. Experts urge this tactic only as a last resort, since it is inherently risky. But resistance did stop a school shooting in Springfield, Ore., in 1998.

The question of whether church leaders or security guards should carry guns is a tricky one, Schaber admitted. Each religious organization must determine an answer for itself.

“There are risks involved” to having guns on the premises, he said. “Training is extremely important, as is the selection of the person given the responsibility of carrying a gun.

“There is a lot that can go wrong if you have armed security at a service and a threat, or perceived threat, occurs. However, that presence also might prevent a threat from ever happening.”

The bottom line? Don’t rely on instinct. Church attacks are a reality in the modern world, so it pays to prepare, Boyd said: “I don’t think any of us grew up in churches where that was a reality, but today it is.”

Posted: 1/30/08

The security of the believer:
protecting churches from attack

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

NEW YORK (ABP)—One day after a shooter killed two sisters at Colorado’s New Life Church, Pastor Brady Boyd told reporters the church had become a target because of its size and its notoriety.

But the toll to the former church of Ted Haggard, the pastor accused of homosexual acts and drug abuse, could have been much worse, Boyd quickly added. The church security team quickly and effectively subdued the attacker, a 24-year-old man who ultimately was shot and killed in the attack.

“Because we took extra precautions, we saved a lot of lives yesterday,” Boyd said. “We have had a plan in place here for many years, before I ever came as senior pastor, for situations like this. And for a group of volunteers to be able to pull off an evacuation plan the way they did yesterday was supernatural and unbelievable.”

But what should an average church do to prepare for a violent crisis? What’s more, how should staff members prepare a congregation for the unthinkable without terrifying it in the process?

It’s helpful to recognize that simply articulating security plans doesn’t mean a church is dangerous any more than pointing out emergency exits on an airplane means it will crash. It just means precautions have been taken.

Experts say the first step to ensuring safety is deciding what kind of image a particular church wants to present and then acting on it. Richard Schaber, risk control manager for Church Mutual Insurance Company, said there are two basic ways to address security in a church—like a shopping mall or like an airport.

Each method has its own irregularities. Shopping malls have lots of open space, allow for fluid motion of crowds, and have several points of entry and exits. For better or for worse, airports don’t.

“Unfortunately when we mostly look at (a church) like a shopping mall, it’s very difficult to secure. You’ve got people coming and going,” Schaber said. But using metal detectors at a single entrance “certainly has an impact on those attending and members. When you treat it like an airport and you’re wanding people, that doesn’t always go over very well.”

Ultimately, there’s no one right way to form the plan for a particular church, he said: “You’ve got to keep what the church wants in mind. How do they want to be seen?”

The essential thing is to make response plans tailored to a specific church, at specific times and in specific scenarios. That begins with forming a security team to identify potential threats. The team should include staff members, volunteers and church members with skills in the medical, military or law-enforcement fields.

Members should then brainstorm threatening scenarios, including events during weekend services, weekdays, nights, school hours and special events.

It’s important to remember that each church will have specific needs, experts say. Generic policies may not fit what a particular congregation is able or willing to implement, and misguided or unheeded policies can increase liability, said Phill Martin, deputy chief executive officer of the Texas-based National Association of Church Business Administration.

Churches need to establish clear security policies, but one size does not fit all, he stressed.

“Be careful what policies you put into place,” Martin warned, noting the “boilerplate” language of generic policies may not fit what a particular congregation is able or willing to implement. “If you have a policy and don’t follow it, it can increase your liability.”

Security policies should include a sunset clause that renders them void if they are not reviewed and ratified periodically. “A security policy should be reviewed every six months by somebody,” he suggested.

Three of the basic threats to churches are the presence of a weapon, the use of a weapon, and a hostage situation or barricaded gunman. After determining the vulnerability to and potential impact of a worst-case scenario, members should assign each other responsibilities that will minimize damage to people and property. Duties could include locking the building, checking classrooms, calling authorities, conducting head counts, administering first-aid and counseling victims.

A simple step toward mitigating the consequences of any security threat is to improve general building security, according to a newsletter from the Wisconsin-based Church Mutual. Keeping doors and windows locked, installing video cameras and adequate lighting, trimming bushes and changing locks annually can prevent a crisis before it starts.

Small churches that can’t afford or don’t need to hire professional security should reach an understanding with local police about what to do in a crisis. Networking with community schools or area churches also is valuable.

Once a team is formed and a safety plan established, church staff should inform the congregation—if someone with a weapon enters the building, panic inevitably will ensue. A crime prevention checklist from Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company suggests using announcements during services to outline evacuation plans, show emergency exits and explain how children will be protected in the nursery. It also suggests posting emergency policies on walls, printing them in the church bulletin, posting them on websites and printing them in visitor packets.

Unfortunately, as worshippers at New Life Church know, the impact of a crisis doesn’t stop after danger is eliminated. A key responsibility of any safety team is to designate a spokesperson for media inquiries—and depending on the nature of the crisis, it could be a huge task.

Church employees and members should direct all media questions to the designated person—usually a pastor, business administrator or board chairman.

A communication plan should be included in the overall security plan—pastors should neither seek nor hide from media coverage, and they should be ready to respond to media questions with more than a “no comment.”

“Your spokesperson needs to realize how the media coverage will affect the families and the victims,” Shaber wrote in a column for Church Mutual. “Above all, tell the truth.”

Boyd took the expert advice to heart—and it paid off.

Hundreds of lives were saved because of the pre-determined plan, he told reporters. “We are grateful to God for giving us the wisdom to do that.”

Managing Editor Ken Camp contributed to this story.

Posted: 2/01/08

Baptists urged to reach out
to victims of sexual exploitation

By Patricia Heys

CBF Communications

ATLANTA—Sexual exploitation is a worldwide issue, Lauran Bethell told an audience at a special interest session of the Celebration of a New Baptist Covenant.

Bethell, an American Baptist Churches USA global ministry consultant, led a panel discussion on sexual exploitation Jan. 31, at the Georgia World Congress Center. Panelists included Lia Scholl, founder of Star Light Ministries, Inc.; Susan Omanson, of the NightLight ministry center in Thailand; and Charity Marquis, who started a branch of NightLight ministries in Los Angeles.

For 14 years, Bethell served as director of New Life Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which ministered among victims of human trafficking. Bethell said that in many developing countries women feel they have an economic responsibility to their families and will sacrifice themselves in prostitution.

“I don’t believe that women are going into prostitution as a life choice—that they are growing up thinking that is what they want to do for the rest of their lives,” Bethell said.

“There is also a pattern of brokenness among women in prostitution, with large numbers of women who are victims of child and sexual abuse. I know that the common thread between those in developed and developing countries is that these women need to know that they are precious daughters of God.”

Omanson, who previously served as pastor of First Baptist Church of Sioux Falls, S.D., said God has called her and is calling the church to reach out to victims.

“We, as Baptists, have come together this week, and we are saying to God, ‘Here I am, help us, hear us,’” Omanson said. “There are people all over the world that have that same heart cry. There are men, women and children who have been caught in exploitation, and I have seen this firsthand in Thailand.”

NightLight reaches out to women and children working in the bar areas of urban Bangkok. The center provides job training, education, shelter, emergency assistance and relational evangelism. Seven women from the center were recently baptized, Omanson said.

Marquis, who is Omanson’s daughter, has facilitated the start of a Los Angeles branch of NightLight, which provides training on recognizing human trafficking and works with local organizations to reach out to victims.

“We wanted to give people an opportunity to partner with us not only globally but also locally,” she said.

Scholl’s ministry is focused in the United States, as Star Light Ministries volunteers reach out to exotic dancers. Scholl said that most exotic dancers are between the ages of 18 and 24, and they often have little no relationship with their families.

“We don’t leave our college students without chaplains, so why would we leave these young women?” Scholl said.

Scholl listed five qualities people need to engage in ministry to exotic dancers:

—“You believe that one event in your life shouldn’t determine whether you have a good life. You believe in second chances, third chances and seven times 70 chances.”

—“You believe that lives can be transformed—God transforms lives and people can transform their own lives. And those two things working together can transform society.”

—“You see people and lives as possibilities.”

—“A really great game face. You will hear stories that will make you want to cry, that will make you shudder, that will make you lose your faith in human beings. But you can’t show it—you have look at the young woman with love and acceptance.”

—“You are compelled to learn.”

The panelists encourage audience members to pray for their ministries and ministries around the world. They also urged people to get involved with local organizations reaching out to victims of sexual exploitation.