After the 2008 Knoxville Tennessee church shooting, I did a series of interviews and the question came up that had not really been asked before "How many churches have security plans in place?”

I mean we knew in general that churches were far behind other organizations in this respect, but no one really quantified it.

So OneNewsNow.Com, one of the most visited Christian news websites, ran a poll asking that very question, and as usual they received a very good response.

What the poll showed was that over 75% of the 3,000-plus churches that responded said that they did not have any security plans in place. And of that over 75%, about 22% said that they did not believe security belonged in a church (meaning they will never even consider it). The remaining percent said that they did, but the number was less than 25%.

When you extrapolate that number to the over 300,000 churches in this country, that is a lot of soft targets and explains the constant crimes we report every day.

Thus began the Christian Security Network and our work to bring about awareness and training to churches on this very topic and here we are almost three years later and as a family of believers, we have made very little progress.

This week OneNewsNow.Com ran an article warning, as CSN has, of the growing threat of terrorist attacks against churches here in the United States.

There has been a dramatic violent shift against Christians in other parts of the world, beginning in Iraq in 2010 when a Christian church was targeted and 58 people were killed. Shortly after, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility and issued a statement that said Christians are now “legitimate targets” in their jihad.

And since that time we are seeing more and more Christians being targeted, not just burning down churches like we have witnessed before, but Christians themselves being executed on the streets and in their churches.

This has spanned across parts of the world including Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and many other parts of the world, including Communist countries like China.

Today a Christian is killed every five minutes because of their faith.

So naturally we expect, based on the past terrorist tactics and emerging intelligence, that eventually terrorism will hit our churches here in the U.S.

There will be some that will roll their eyes at this and say it is scare tactics, but these are the same people that rolled their eyes when intelligence sources predicted terrorists will use planes as flying missiles against high profile targets inside our country.

To paraphrase Joel Rosenberg, as he said in his book Epicenter, what makes us vulnerable is not the lack of information or intelligence, because it is there; it is our lack of imagination and failure to believe that it will ever happen that makes us vulnerable.

So this past week OneNewsNow.Com conducted another poll asking "Does your church have any security measures in place as a safeguard against terror-related attacks?"

Not surprising, the last time I looked at the poll almost 8,000 people responded (which is a great sampling) and less than 15% said they did, over 58% said "No" and over 26% said they did not know (my guess would be no).

So that is about 85% that are not ready, which again makes for many soft targets.

On this 4th of July when we celebrate our God-given freedom and all the blessing we have to worship freely and openly in this great country, take a look back at history and see how easy it is to lose this if you don't follow God's words of staying vigilant, combating evil, and foreseeing danger and planning ahead.

Our Christian community needs to wake up.

God bless the United States of America.

In Christ,
Jeff Hawkins
Executive Director