Why Church Security Teams Need More Than Active Shooter Training

When most churches think about safety training, one topic rises to the top: active shooter response. It’s understandable—high-impact, high-fear, high-stakes. But according to church insurers like Brotherhood Mutual, focusing solely on the extreme can leave your team unprepared for the situations they’ll face every single week.

In 2022, Brotherhood Mutual published an article emphasizing the importance of not only training for armed intruder scenarios but also preparing volunteers for the far more common incidents that happen on church campuses.

As church safety trainer Craig Cable from Lightwell Insurance Advisors put it:
“Training is the learning ground, it’s where you can make mistakes and explore ways to improve.”

He’s right. The safest place to fail is in training—not in your lobby, not during a service, not in front of your congregation. Training gives you the ability to pause, reset, adjust, and try again until your team finds success.

But here’s the challenge: while churches know they need scenario-based training (often called Structured Reality-Based Training or SRBT), very few volunteer teams have the experience to design scenarios that are realistic, consistent, and effective.

And that’s exactly where our SRBT 10-Pack fills the gap.

Scenario-Based Training Your Team Can Actually Use

A well-designed training scenario does more than “act out a problem.” It establishes:

• Clear learning objectives

• Actor instructions

• A realistic story foundation

• Follow-up questions for performance evaluation

• Ministry Reinforcement

Our SRBT 10-Pack includes all of this, packaged into ready-to-run scenarios for your whole team. These scenarios cover the types of incidents churches deal with every single month—long before an armed intruder ever becomes a threat.

Teams will practice responding to:

• Disruptive individuals

• Medical emergencies

• Vandalism and Property Damage

• Child Custody Incidents

• Suspicious behavior

• Common “people problems” that arise across ministries

(Click the image above to go directly to the scenario pack.)

If You Want Successful Teams, You Must Prepare Them for Success

We can’t expect volunteers to excel under pressure if the only training they receive focuses on worst-case scenarios. Safety in the real world is built on a foundation of everyday competence, not rare-event heroism.

A balanced training plan includes:

• De-escalation

• Medical triage

• Incident command

• Trauma-informed approaches

• Tactical preparedness

• Firearms qualifications (where appropriate)

• Critical decision-making

Each is important. But if a church spends all its training time on lethal threats… the output will reflect lethal-threat prep—not the skillset needed for the problems happening every single Sunday.

Your volunteers deserve better. Your congregation deserves better. And with structured, thoughtful scenarios, your team can become confident, prepared, and mission-ready.