“Wake-Up Call”: Amid Growing Violence, More Churches Turn To Faith-Based Security Groups

Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Carl Chinn, 65, is a man of deep faith who thought church was a place to go to find peace—until he locked eyes with an angry gunman 28 years ago.

On May 2, 1996, a man carrying a rifle, a handgun, and claiming to have explosives walked into the Focus on the Family ministry in Colorado Springs and took four hostages.

A police officer stands guard outside Emanuel AME Church after a shooting took place, in Charleston, S.C., on June 20, 2015. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Chinn was one of those hostages, and his experience changed his outlook on the vulnerability of churches from that day forward.

Before then, “security wasn’t even in the back of my mind,” he said.

The suspect, a construction worker, carried out the attack four years after he injured himself while building the ministry’s new 256,000-square-foot facility.

He filed for disability at the time, but his insurance ruled the injury was due to “horseplay” and substantially cut his benefits.

It took four years for the man’s anger to reach critical mass—four years to come back to “exact his form of justice,” Chinn told The Epoch Times.

“He wanted to go out suicide by cop.”

During the hostage situation, the man shot into a wall before police were able to arrest him.

“That was my wake-up call,” Chinn said. “That incident changed the trajectory of my life.”

It also wasn’t the only time he encountered an armed intruder in church.

In 2007, Matthew John Murray, 24, killed two people and wounded two others as he opened fire at a church youth training center in Arvada, Colorado.

Murray evaded law enforcement and later that afternoon he shot and killed two more people and wounded three others at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs before he was fatally shot by a security team member.

Chinn was there on the day of the shooting. He knew one thing about the gunman: “He hated Christians.”

The former building engineer said after the first incident in which he was held hostage, he started reading up on the degree to which attacks were happening in churches across the United States.

Chinn looked at law enforcement databases and found violent attacks were a leading cause of death in churches: Around 1,050 people died out of 2,361 total incidents between 1999 and 2020.

He compiled a list of “deadly force incidents” for the 22-year period and found the No. 1 reason was robbery, with 464 incidents (24.4 percent).

Law enforcement continues their investigation around the Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in Antioch, Tenn., on Sept. 24, 2017. One person was killed and seven were wounded when a gunman opened fire in the church. Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images

The second-leading cause of fatal force encounters was domestic violence, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all cases.

Five percent of the deadly force incidents were motivated by hatred against houses of worship, Chinn said. Recent incidents show that anti-religious bias is not going away.

On May 5, a man walked up to the pulpit and pointed a gun at Glenn Germany, pastor of the Jesus’ Dwelling Place Church in Braddock, Pennsylvania, while he was preaching.

The man tried to pull the trigger but the gun jammed, according to news reports. Another church member quickly wrestled the gun from him.

In another incident, a man was wounded in the leg after a woman with a history of mental illness began shooting an AK-47 inside the Lakewood Church in Texas on Feb. 11.

Genese Moreno, 36, was killed by police after she opened fire. In a hail of bullets, her 7-year-old son also died.

Chinn, president of the Faith Based Security Network (FBSN) founded in 2017, said that deadly attacks at houses of worship are becoming more commonplace.

He said it’s a sign of the times and an ominous indicator of a society in rapid moral decline.

“We absolutely are seeing more animosity towards faith-based organizations by those who espouse what I would call anti-moral opinions,” Chinn said.

“I believe we are going to continue seeing attacks.”

The FBSN now boasts 800 members from Christian congregations, as well as Jewish synagogues and other religious groups across the nation.

Chinn, who has witnessed a dramatic hardening of public buildings against acts of violence, said attacks against houses of prayer is a growing issue.

“You can hardly walk into a school without being stopped,” Chinn said. “It’s getting harder to do an attack at a school. It’s getting hard to perform an attack on any municipality or government building.”

He said that historically, churches have been the last to shore up their facilities against deadly violence and other potential disruptions

Photographs of the nine victims killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, are held up by congregants during a prayer vigil in Washington on June 19, 2015.

Assessing Threats

Chinn’s mission as an FBSN instructor of “intentional security readiness” is to make membership organizations “ready, willing, and able to protect the people they love.”

Raising awareness of potential threats, creating security teams and protocols, building security, and using deadly force and non-lethal means are some of the things the FBSN teaches.

“I believe it is an absolute requirement for the coming age,” Chinn said. “I think we’re in for tough times in this country. The divisions are very sharp.”

Chinn found that 118 people had died in 2017 and 88 people died in 2018, according to law enforcement databases. Each year, there were 261 reported incidents.

In 2019, there were 216 total violent incidents and 74 deaths. During the pandemic, there were 178 incidents and 71 deaths.

“I absolutely believe there is a slip in moral character in our country which has lessened the degree of respect for sanctuary-type places,” Chinn said.

“In fact, there’s hatred toward faith-based organizations. There is a cry for something to be more stable. I don’t know what the political solution is.”

Death By Numbers

Each year, the FBI collects data on 49 different types of crime through the National Incident-Based Reporting System with reports from law enforcement agencies in 32 states.

The Dolan Consulting Group, which provides training for law enforcement, examined 17 years of FBI data between 2000 and 2017 and counted 1,652 violent incidents against houses of worship, including robbery, aggravated assault, shootings, stabbings, and bombings.

The 1,652 violent incidents resulted in 155 deaths and 742 injuries over the time period. On average there were 97 incidents per year causing nine deaths and 44 injuries.

“Extrapolating to the whole U.S. population, we estimated that there are actually about 480 incidents of serious violence at places of worship in the U.S. each year,” according to the Dolan Consulting Group.

Emergency vehicles line the feeder road outside Lakewood Church during a reported active shooter event in Houston on Feb. 11, 2024. Kirk Sides/Houston Chronicle via AP

“These incidents produce about 46 deaths and 218 serious injuries annually. This is a serious problem. As the vast majority of places of worship in the U.S. are Christian churches, it is not surprising that 94 percent of the incidents occurred at Christian churches.”

In 2019, the FBI said that hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,650 incidents reported by law enforcement.

Around 60 percent of these incidents were against Jews, 13.3 percent were against Muslims, 4 percent were against Catholics, and 3.6 percent were against other Christians.

Chinn said his organization does not monitor hate crimes, focusing instead on lethal encounters.

“We only track deadly force incidents. When you’re tracking the worst of the worst, the data set changes,” he said.

The Arizona Church Security Network is a group that helps around 300 churches in Arizona with resources and training.

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