What do Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alaska, Florida, and Montana have in common?

Well, according to our crime tracking, all of them have had serial criminals targeting churches in certain areas of these states, committing multiple offenses in a given area this year.

There may be more that we have missed, but the point is, especially if you live in one of these states, did you know this was happening, do you know what areas of your state was getting targeted, and do you know what types of crimes churches were experiencing?

This is important because if your church is in the middle of a crime spree, wouldn't you want to know about it and maybe take some extra precautions?

Churches treat these waves of crime differently than other crisis situations.

If there were a hurricane, wild fire, snow storm, flood, or some other natural disaster being predicted for your area, you would most likely take measures to reduce the potential for loss of life and property - but why not crimes?

Most law enforcement agencies try to communicate these crime sprees when they start occurring by contacting the media, holding meetings, or distributing e-mails, texts, or flyers.

But this is usually after the situation has gotten to a serial crime spree stage.

The time to find out about crimes against churches is when they occur directly from the victim church.

And this is where the importance of networking comes into play.

I have not gone into many areas and found that churches have a great networking system; they just don't talk to each other and I cannot understand why?

Prior to September 11th, when I was working as a Security Director for a large institution in Chicago, we had a Security Director's Group of most of the major venues that had a large amount of the public visit them daily as part of their business.

We would meet every month or so to discuss what each organization was experiencing because what we ended up finding out after we started this group was that most of us were experiencing the same types of incidents, often involving the same criminals.

The information sharing became priceless.

We eventually started an e-mail distribution for important information and the one thing we put into place was a call-tree.

Call trees are low-tech ways to reach a large amount of people, very quickly, with little individual effort - they have been around forever.

The way it works is everyone has a document and when something happens of a critical nature that is time sensitive, the originator calls two people, and they call two people, etc.

Our test of the call tree came the morning of September 11, 2001 and my office started the emergency notification that we were shutting own, sending tourists back to their hotels, sending staff home, and putting our facility in high-level security lock-down.

We didn't wait too long before we put our plans into effect, in fact it only took the second World Trade Center tower to get hit by the terrorist controlled plane and a call to our local FBI contact to determine the time to act was before anything else happened.

It worked very well and later we would be told by the city's emergency service agencies that they were thankful we had this in place because it helped shut down and secure the city before any panic set in and made their job that much easier in a crisis situation.

Every area of churches should have a network of contacts and a call-tree.

When one church experiences a crime, all other churches should know about it as soon as possible, because they may be next.

You can't stop all crime at your church, but you may be able to help the next church from having one.

And isn't that the Christian thing to do?

"Though one may be overpowered,  two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." Ecclesiastes 4:12 (NIV)

In Christ,
Jeff Hawkins
Executive Director