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I'm a new member and at present am at the first stage of setting up a team at our medium size church. I have met with our pastor's and board members, presented a short presentation on the need for a safety team and presented a rough draft of team procedures and legal requirements etc. I expect to hear back on the proposal within a couple weeks. My background is 30 years law enforcement in Southern California, with a large degree of specialized training. I'm retired and like a lot of us I miss the profession, I guess it gets in the blood and the body needs it!

I have read many of the forum entries and wanted to say that there are many very good ideas among them. There is a lot of experience among the members and that experience undoubtable has and will have a positive effect in the ministries represented on this site.

As in any worthwhile endeavor there will be times when it seems that the original vision is not where it once was. Having a forum like this can be a great sorce of energy and a very important sounding board and I look forward to being an active member. I ask that all members contiinue to stay active on the forum, to be successful in our calling we need each other's prayers and sharing. Looking at this forum with fresh eyes I can see the effort and caring that has gone into the forum and am honored to be among this group of believers and doers!

Calmo2000

Thanks for the response back Steve. It's nice to have a site that saves reinventing the wheel and also nice that there are people of like minds willing to share with others.

Thanks for the welcome Ross. What is the makeup of your team, LE, retired, business, white collar, blue collar, male, female, ages, etc.? Have you found any problems with a mix of different and varied backgrounds?

Have any other teams out there experienced any problems with a mix of backgrounds?

Thanks.

It sounds like you have a good mix of people with a wide variety of experiences. I believe the wide variety of experience can be a real blessing to a dedicated unit, sometimes when everyones background is the same they all seem to see the same thing in the same way and sometimes obvious things, or ideas are missed.

Most of the groundwork is done for our ministry and we are starting to build the teams slowly. My hope is to have three teams, each with different responsibilities, but cross trained to the extent possible.

Thanks for the good ideas.

Regarding the 3 teams I spoke of in my post, they consist of a security team a medical team and an emergency response team.

Everybody in the Safety Ministry is first a member of the emergency response team, with training in evacuations, shelter in place, observation techniques, etc.

The medical team has the added responsibility of handling medical situations and providing limited and practical medical training to other team members not in the medical response team. (We are blessed with many in the medical field).

The security team has the added responsibility of handling security situations as well as providing training to other team members not assigned to the security team. (Again we are blessed with expertise in this field also).

All three teams are cross trained where practical and possible.

In this way all of the team members are exposed, at least at some level, with what the other teams do and are able to fill in if needed. In that way everybody can reach a competent level in several areas and it also allows some movement between teams to help keep the inevitable boredom in control.