NOTE: this article was written last week after the reported incident, since then it appears that the church Deacon lied about the incident: http://www.valleymorningstar.com/news/sunnyvale-64866-allegedly-texas.html

Please note that the article below is still relevant from the perspective if proper procedures would have been followed, there would have not have been a question whether incident occured or not.

This story is still developing and the victim has not been charged.

One of the reasons we feature news articles in our weekly newsletter is to highlight details of certain criminal incidents because each one can teach us a lesson.

We list all recent incidents on the front page of the website, about the last ten days, and we keep a running total of all criminal incidents against all Christian organizations, mostly churches, in the U.S. for our subscribers.

Currently there are over 1,100 incidents including 25 robberies and 45 violent incidents resulting in 11 deaths recorded.

One of the incidents we noted recently was the robbery of a church in Texas during services. According to news reports an elderly usher was walking the collection to the room where the church has a safe and was confronted by three men armed with a baseball bat. When I saw the news reports it really sounded, I hate to say, uneventful...the news even kind of made fun of the story interviewing the usher who stated that he got a "couple of good punches in"...how cute.

We often receive e-mails, phone calls, and press clipping from our subscribers and people who receive our newsletter and we appreciate all the information and as it happened, one was about this incident in Texas and it didn't sound as "cute" as the news report.

This was a situation that had many lessons to be learned, and many of these are my assumption, but here they are:

Mistake #1: the church allowed one person to walk the collections to the room where the safe was located. My guess is the same routine was used every week because the bad guys knew exactly where to go and when.

Mistake #2: there was no security escort or multiple people taking the collection, which is not only an invitation for internal theft (one person?), but the usher, old or young, had no chance against three men with a baseball bat.

Mistake #3: there were police outside to direct traffic and maybe the church felt that this was a deterrence or counted as "security"...obviously not to the guys with the baseball bat. It doesn't seem they cared whether there were police outside or not: they were inside. Which brings us to the next mistake which is...

Mistake #4: who was watching the doors? Obviously the doors were not staffed or someone would have seen three guys walking in, probably not looking like "church goers" or a baseball team, plus the service was already in progress.

Mistake #5: no none taught the person handling the cash how to handle an armed robbery - first rule, don't resist, no amount of money is worth it. Sure in the news he stated he got in "a couple punches", but my sources tell me that he was beaten unconscious with the bat and darned lucky he wasn't killed. Heck, they even teach the store clerks at the 7/11 to hand over the money and not resist.

I don't know if there were any security cameras that caught the incident, either inside the room where the safe is located or in the church in general.

This was a fortunate situation in the sense that no one was killed and I sincerely hope that this would be a wake up call to that church in Texas; my understanding is they did not have a Safety/Security Team in place (obviously).

This incident exemplifies how bold criminals are these days; to walk into a church in broad daylight, during a service, with cops outside and commit an armed robbery.

I pray with all my heart that every church would learn from an incident like this. There is absolutely no reason that these incidents have to happen.

When I trained in Israel and the former IDF Commander said to me "See what our people have had to suffer over the years and how much blood has had to be spilled before we took the measures that we take now....how much blood will have to be spilled in the United States before your people take security seriously?", I thought he was talking about terrorist attacks, I never thought we would be talking about blood being spilled in our churches by common criminals.

So I guess the question is, how many deaths will it take for the Christian church in the U.S. to wake up?

So far 45 violent incidents have taken place this year and 11 people have died. How much blood, my brothers and sisters, will have to be spilled in our churches?

In Christ,
Jeff Hawkins
Executive Director