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Our church is a small one with the average sunday attendace around 200. We hardly ever have had any issues but with our location just 5 mins from the church in Knoxville, TN where the shooting occured this year we want to increase our security… or create it.

We're thinking of installing a survallience system that would cover all the entrances and parking lot with a screen in the media booth for monitoring. That's all fine and dandy but my question is what is the best way to notify the team if something happened? The suggestion for colored dots on the projection screen that only the team would know the meaning of, but I don't like that. 1.) It's a very good changes the members wouldn't see it. 2.) With a small church there's no way that other people wouldn't know what it meant… and I don't want to cause panic if something did happen. We've talked about a text msg alert to be sent from the monitor in the media booth, but that could take too much time. The only other option I know of is a earpiece. But the only thing I have against that is 1.) In our church we may only need to use it once a year or less so I'm afraid slowly the team would "forget" it or just decide not to do it. And 2.) If the monitor is in the media booth and they had to speak "caution entrance 1" or "gun entrance 1" in to a radio for the team to respond by, there's SEVERAL people around the booth would hear him say that.

Do any of you have suggestions as for the best way to deal with this. The only other idea i have is to always have 1 person on patrol so to speak and that person would be the only one in communication with the monitor and would not be seated during service. This would prevent him from having to be notified while listening to service. Then the others in the team would simply be ready to respond if someone came in. But again thinking in the worst case scenario like at the church down the street… I'd like multiple people to be pre-warned of a stranger in the building rather than be caught off guard by a gun.

Please advise…

-MSL

karatejake said:

Let me first start by saying, my church is about the same as what you described. We average 150 to 200 on a Sunday morning. We started a security team in March of 2008. It has actually been a great blessing because since then we've had a few things happen that we've been able to assist with. We purchased a radio and a radio earpiece (See links below) for each member of the team. The one thing is, you have to remind them of the importance of wearing them at all times. We had a problem with people not thinking it was necessary and it was “over the top”, so to speak. People got used to it though and it is now common-place. So, I can pretty much promise you, it'll take some work to begin with, but it shouldn't take too long to get used to it.

Radios: (Scroll down to bottom and click Cobra PR-190-2VP Two Way Radios)

Earpieces: (Scroll down and select “Bodyguard.”)

You, obviously can select anything that fits your needs, these are just what we chose. Let me know what you think.

Thanks Jake,

Just sold our old radios on eBay and used the money to buy the new Cobra ones you listed a link for. Once again this site is instrumental in helping me forge a quality team. Thanks!