Security In Church
Posted on December 11, 2006
I know my last post was long, maybe too long, but it’s an important message. I know some have read it all the way through because I have gotten some feedback, but I want to re-emphasize a point.
Security in church is extremely important and if you haven’t considered it, take a minute to read this:
According to the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), more than 200,000 family abductions occur in the U.S. each year. “Family abduction†refers to an incident where a child is taken in violation of a custody agreement. This amounts to more than 560 family abductions per day! The reality is that churches are not immune to this statistic.
So what? Consider this scenario:
Susan, Nathan’s mom, drops Nathan off in the nursery. Midway through the Sunday morning worship service, Bill, Nathan’s dad, comes to pick him up. The nursery worker thinks nothing of it, and hands Nathan over to his dad. After the worship service, Susan comes back to pick Nathan up only to find out that he was already picked up by his dad. The nursery worker promptly finds out by Susan that Nathan’s dad has a restraining order against him, and should not even be around Nathan. Susan is obviously upset, and the nursery worker feels horrible for what she has done.
This is not a made up scenario, used as a scare tactic, this is a real situation and I’m sure it happens more than we care to know.
That scenario is what drives KidzPro to be what it is. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned your church is or your volunteers are, protecting our kids needs to be a priority. If we wait until something happens, it’s too late.
The point is not to operate in fear, the point is to give everyone a comfort level that we, as the church, are doing all that we can do to protect our kids.
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3 Responses to “Security In Church”
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Great word, Jim. It bears repeating often. The familial threat is very sneaky indeed, but without diligent workers, no system is bullet-proof. Systems like Kidzpro are awesome security facilitators and catalysts of awareness. If we love Jesus, we must care for His sheep.
Good one. Its little things like this, we wish we had done after something bad happens.
Good point but sticky, there are many custody situations in which a restraining order is not in place but a custody order is. My wife runs a christian preschool and runs into this occasionally, Parent A has a custody order limiting Parent B. But unless the school has the court order on file, or the church in this application. The church, school or police can do nothing to prevent a Parent from taking the child, A restraining order would be kept on file by the police, but in reality those are rare. We have seen this come up in church a couple of times and it is very dificult. This goes beyond software, since the data would be entered before a custody order is in place or there is another problem. Parent A says that Parent B can not take the child but there is no court order. Software will not help you in this situation. Church Policy must demand that a child will not be kept from a Parent unless the appropriate court records are kept on file.
Now, the real scarey situation of a person walking into a nursery and asking for “tommy” but no one really knows if tommy belongs to the person reqesting the child and there is no way to varify if the child belongs to the person saying they are a parent or relative. That is a real situation that has happened in churches and daycare centers. Usually ones close to a highway or interstate, that way the abductor has a quick way to escape with the child. That is a situaion that software and a quality check in system can help with.