167: Kingdom Defense Training

To the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it. The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy.

Christ as King and the Local Church

Christ is king. You can't be Christian without a local church.

You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible-believing church, and spend your life serving Jesus in a local, visible congregation.

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. I am Thank you. Yeah, Jordan, I'm your host. Here's my guest, Jordan Howe. And I'm your host, Alan Nelson, one of the pastors at Providence Baptist Church. We're a reformed Baptist church, with security, I might add.

We're just a small church, brother, and we've tried to think through these things well. But Jordan is with, is your company called Kingdom Defense Training,.

Or is that Yes, sir, that's it, Kingdom Defense Training.

And you, are you owner-operator, or are you part of

Yeah, head instructor and owner. So there's a couple guys that help with it. They do some of the thesis instructing,.

But it's primarily my thing. Yeah, so Kingdom Defense Training. Is there a way that they can find that? Is there a, you got online?

Yeah, so I've got a website, Kingdom Defense Training, or it's in progress, or we're trying to get more on there. And then Patreon as well, where I do some articles, and some videos, and stuff like that.

And then Twitter as well, Kingdom D-E-F Train, I think is the handle. So those are kind of the three places where you can find, where I try to put information out that's related to safety and security.

Yeah, and you've written a book on I have. Safety and security.

How can folks find that out? So that'll be available, hopefully, in October of this year, and that'll be through Bereth Press, or Bereth Press, I believe it is. So that should be coming out any day now, actually.

So, and it's called a Ministry of Defense. And so whenever it comes out, just look for that title, and you should be good.

How about, I was trying to think, there's so many places that we could start. You know, maybe you want to just share a little bit about yourself, but I also want to get into, pretty quickly, the biblical defense of defense, if that makes sense.

Because some people who would say, oh, you guys, you know, we don't need guns, we don't need those sorts of things. So how about you just give us a little brief introduction to Jordan, and then let's make a defense here for why safety and security matter.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I live in Cape Coral, Florida. I'm a member at Grace Baptist Church, deacon over safety and security there. A student at Founder Seminary. So that's the theology side of it. The other side of it, I've been a cop for 10 years, firearms instructor, defensive tactics instructor, first aid, CPR, stop the bleed, all that sort of stuff.

And so kind of putting those two things together. The last few years, I've worked as a school resource officer specifically. And so kind of the day job is protecting a building full of a lot of people.

And so a lot of that kind of bleeds into this. And so I was doing this for a while, and our church was getting requests, and I started doing a lot of work and figured maybe I could charge people for it and make a little bit of extra money on the side.

And that's why I started human defense training. Yeah, that's good.

Good to hear. So what would your, if someone asked you, you know, Jordan, I mean, you're a deacon in your church, a solid church. Dr. Haskell has been a friend to us and to our church, and our church is really in many ways where we're at today because of the care of churches like Grace Baptist at Cape Coral.

So you're in a solid church. What would you say the theological reason is that safety and security should matter to churches?

The Moral Law and the Duty to Preserve Life

Yeah, I always go back to the fundamental. It's found in the moral law. And so when God says, you know, that we should not murder, there's a value in human life that's put there. And so it's not just enough to live your life as someone who doesn't murder, but as somebody who actually preserves life.

And so being pro-life is more than just a argument for against abortion. It's actually a way that we conduct ourselves. And so it's why we shouldn't speed on the highways and why we should be careful when we're doing things that are potentially dangerous.

And so out of that preserved life, out of that command, one thing that we have to do is be able to protect people if harm comes their way. And as Christians, I think we see that clearly and so it's something that we should be doing importantly and should make it a priority in our lives as men, as Christians, and then especially as people who lead a church where you've got, you know, people in there that are potentially vulnerable or considered innocent.

You know, they're not thinking in that way. It's a way that you can shepherd them. And, you know, we get the, pastors are often called shepherds. And a lot of times we take the spiritual side of that, but David really did throw rocks at animals and he really did fight off bears and wolves.

And so there's a physical aspect of that as well, where, you know, we need to make sure that we provide a safe place for our congregants to worship.

Yeah, and we live in a nation, we do some mission work in Mexico with some faithful brothers. They have different laws and such, you know, there are things they're just not able to do because of the place that they live in.

Whereas we live in a place with the freedoms that, with, you know, as the old hero adage goes, with great freedom comes great responsibility, but we do have the freedom and the right. And I think we could have a whole, we're not gonna do it today, but we could have a whole series on the 10 commandments and an excellent theological grounding there, you know, that thou shall not murder is not just about, well, I haven't killed anybody.

If there's an opposite implication there, that is required. I'm not only required to not take life, I'm required insofar as I'm able to protect and preserve life. And so that brings us into the American church where we do have the means, the ability.

Security Practices for Churches of Different Sizes

So what does that look like? And I don't know, there may be certain things you can't really talk about, but what does that look like at a place like Grace? Because you have a place, so we can talk about this a little bit, but you have a place where you have some high profile leadership and you have some even like people who would hate your pastor that is not even local, you know, potentially come from wherever.

So what would that look like there? And then what would it look like at just, you know, your average little country Baptist church, you know? So let's talk about the Grace at Cape Coral first.

We can work it. Yeah, so I mean, generally a lot of it's the same. I tend to make the argument that the safer your church is, the better your ecclesiology is. And so there's a lot of like the things, the nine marks of a healthy church are the nine marks of a safe church.

You know, the 10th mark is just applying those in a safety and security type of way. And so we have our own challenges. Like we have more members. We have a lot of members that travel from, or attenders that travel from long distances sometimes to come to our church.

And people know who Tom Askell is. They follow him on X and, you know, he said some things and we've had several phone calls and death threats and things like that that have come to our church. And so we've had to react accordingly to that.

We've had to beef up security in some ways and we've had to do. So that changes some of those nuanced things. You know, we shadow Tom on a Sunday morning. There's usually someone who's not too far away.

I travel with him to the SBC. And then when the founders conferences are there as well, there's usually somebody always within arm's reach. But just because he is a profile and he is out there and, you know, we understand that.

Unfortunately, the hatred towards being vocal in the public square is alive and well. And so we have to make that a priority. But the core of it is just simply understanding, you know, preaching a biblical view of manhood and womanhood, preaching discipleship, understanding church discipline.

All of those things are the biggest things that are gonna make a church safer and not safer. The rest of it is just kind of how do we orient this solid foundation that we have towards a goal specifically of safety and security.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. So what about, what are you gonna say to the guy that is, you know, like, look, Jordan, we're just, we're a small church, you know, out here in Arkansas, or we don't even put anything online.

You know, what should security look like for us?

Yeah, well, for those guys, it's gonna be mostly what issues potentially in your congregation, right? Not everything is solved with a gun, not everything is solved with a fist. And so most of what we do is gonna be medical issues.

You have young children, you have elderly people, the chance of a slip and fall, someone getting hurt, those are real things. You're gonna counsel domestic issues where you need to maybe have someone who understands, who is willing to stand in the middle of that and possibly risk bodily injury to be able to counsel and give the gospel there.

You're gonna have people that are hurting and drugs and alcohol that might need to come into your congregation. And you wanna shoo them away? No, but we can, if we have guys who are designated as our safety team, they can help minister to those people in that way.

And even some things as simple as I know a guy at a church who had an elderly saint, her husband passed away and she found a bunch of guns in her house and didn't know what to do with them. And so we had, you know, having members that know how those operate, being able to go to the house and clear those firearms for her and take care of them.

Like that's an easy way to minister to somebody that, you know, people don't necessarily think of as being an important and depending on the context, it's more likely to happen or less likely to happen.

Yeah, and I would even say,.

I don't know what you'd say this, I don't have the percentage, you know, the stat or whatever, but I would say that, you know, some sort of shooting event at a church, an unknown church or whatever, it's very, very unlikely, but it's not zero.

Correct, yeah.

And it's not, and it seems to be rising, you know, you gotta think churches are a place where there's a lot of people at a lot of time and we're seeing that, you know, active shooter cases tend to change every so often, you kind of track them to see what they were, what the goal or the intent of that shooting is.

And recently we've seen a uptick in just causing chaos. There was actually a year ago, I think this week, that a LDS church, you know, call it a church for the sake of the story, in Minnesota or Michigan was attacked and basically just drove a truck through the thing and through the front doors and set the building on fire.

Wasn't really looking to cause a massive body count as much as it was just chaos and fear. And so with that, you know, we're seeing things and even just simply a few months ago, City's Church in Minneapolis, where people came in to do a demonstration, like those are the types of things that are occurring.

And I think the percentage is only gonna go up as we continue to operate in our current society.

Pastors, Deacons, and Safety-Team Leadership

And it's really almost impossible. I mean, I guess theoretically, if you had a plurality of elders, but I mean like even here at our church, we have two elders, but it would be almost impossible for the elders to take the responsibility as far as the functional responsibility.

Now we have the overarching responsibility of the safety of the church, but I'm talking about functionally in the church. So talk about that, like the pastor's role, because his role came, I mean, if he's gonna be responsible for the gathering and the preaching and the worship, talk about that.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the pastor's gonna lead by teaching, by understanding, laying that foundation, by explaining why these things are appropriate, and then by, you know, giving the means to the people.

But the biggest thing is finding the right type of man. And I put a, there's something in the book that I wrote, and I think I put in an article at one point too, is that the best man may not be the right man, right?

You might have a guy in your church who's got all the history in the world, was, you know, former service member, former cop, current cop, whatever. But if they don't understand the ministry of the church, they may not be the best one to put in charge.

You don't always need a hammer. And so when we take a ministerial view of what a safety and security team does, then we realize how we can actually help the church and serve the church. And that's where the pastor really comes in handy is attaching that to, hey, no, this is a first principle of the 10 commandments.

We have to preserve life. Now, how do we preserve life? Well, there's medical training we can do. There's medical equipment we can do. And then there's the firearms and defensive side of that. And finding a man who is willing to lead, if you have a solid deacon who's able to do it, and they can form the team.

You might have guys who are better suited, better shooters or better this or better that. Putting them under one guy who understands the ministry of the church is the biggest thing. And then from there, the rest of the skills you can learn.

It's not hard to teach somebody how to shoot. It's not hard to teach them how to fight. But it's really difficult to teach somebody to love the local church and to see how that attaches to safety and security and how you can actually be a ministry as opposed to just something that shows up on Sunday and has a role that is secondary to the ministry of the church.

Yeah, so a couple of things to mention. And we've already kind of touched this, so circling back. But wouldn't you think that in a sense, we're in an unprecedented time in American history? So if you try to reach back at the beginning of our nation, you're like, well, I didn't see any churches.

I didn't see any churches in the early 1800s with security teams. Well, it's like, this is different, right? Like we live in sort of a new era. You mentioned that hostility, political disagreement is at its peak.

I mean, there used to be, even like when I was growing up, so I'm 40. So like when I was growing up, there used to be a time I can remember like, look, there's people of the Democratic Party. I think they're wrong on some things, but I think they're pursuing, like I think they're Christians.

It was a long time ago now. But over the 21st century, that has evolved into, look, you can't, if you are affiliated with the Democratic Party in any way, like you are openly hate God, you know? And there's consequences to that in a nation.

You hate God, you hate the church. So anyway, so that's, we've kind of touched on that. I guess one option, you've kind of, you wrote an article about this before, but one option with churches is maybe like outsourcing, hiring a security team, but I think that has some, carries with it some problems.

So talk about that.

Why In-House Church Security Can Serve the Congregation

Yeah, so I mean, you absolutely can. I mean, the biggest problem is gonna be the cost, especially for smaller churches, the going rate for, you know, if you were to hire a police officer or a security team is pretty high.

Secondly, it does kind of ruin that ministerial aspect of that, right? And so those people there, they have a goal in mind, especially if it's a police officer that you've hired. And if there's, let's say a domestic dispute that comes up and there's no, nothing illegal has occurred yet, they may just get involved.

Hey, everyone go home, let's separate. Well, we as Christians may want to counsel. There may be a need there to, hey, come sit down with an elder and let's talk about this issue. Let's move this thing, right?

We don't need to just kick this person off of our property. The same thing if someone who is perhaps a homeless person who is on drugs or alcohol or something like that, there's a way in which we can minister to them without that sort of outsourcing that we have there.

And so the outsourcing may make you, like the security side of it's gonna be great. However, they're typically, it loses that connection and that ministerial aspect of it. And there's something about just knowing like those are, there's guys in my church, they're part of my family, they're part of my covenanted group that are taking this role of safety and security that really just helps the church and helps them be able to say, hey, this is your role during it.

This is your role during this event. And then the ways that they can help even outside of the regular service.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think the best course of action is internal, you know, and most churches have, depending on your size, a brother or two that are willing. Here, I can just tell you how that looks like here.

We're a small church. And so we make sure our other entrances are locked. And then we guard our main entrance when we have different brothers that rotate on that. And basically, yes, they're armed and they're guarding the front.

We have cameras that kind of, it's just, it's a pretty simple thing. We're a small church and I think that other churches can really mimic that. What would a company like Kingdom Defense be able to do?

You know, you may not be able to travel to a place like Arkansas, but someone's listening, they're close to you and you can travel there. What could you offer to a church? Like, use this example, what could you do?

Yeah, so biggest thing, you know, do an assessment, see, hey, what are some weak spots maybe you haven't thought of? And some dangers of like, hey, that's actually, a kid could jump off of that or a kid could split his head open on that.

So some simple things like that. It's having an outsider kind of come in can help view those things. And then just say, hey, how do you, you have this idea for this security team, this is what you want, all right?

Let me help you find the guys. Here's what I kind of look for. Here's some things. Here's a list of skillsets that you might wanna consider being like your base minimum. Here's how do you do cameras? How do you do a schedule?

How do you put these things together? And so that's part of what we help do, kind of how do you form the team? Because there's a lot of churches, unfortunately, I call it the approved skipper, where they just kind of say, you and you go sit in the lobby, you have guns and they'll sit in the lobby and they talk all service and they get a high five and a pat on the back as they're serving the Lord.

And it's like, man, I want that man in church. I want him under the preaching and teaching of the word. And so how do you minister to the guys on the team? How do you set this up to where they are getting the best they can?

And then asking the questions beforehand, like what does your church do if someone, if a man in a dress comes in and sits down? What do you do if a very openly and flamboyant homosexual couple shows up at your church?

What is your plan? And so if you haven't thought about those things ahead of time, it becomes really hard to make those decisions in the moment and can be disastrous for you. Well, and with our technology today,.

We talked about this a little bit before, but you're able to give at least some feedback and some consultation on Zoom if a church was interested. Yeah, most of the setting up stuff,.

Most of the like, how do you do, I wrote a whole manual for our church and like forms for like the legal side of it. So all of that, that is helpful to kind of just get you oriented to what is a team?

How does it work? And all of that, I give those away to people when they ask for them. And we can help via Zoom a lot of times in that way and help people set up teams and get the ball rolling on that.

And then we can do the tactical training on the other side, some remotely. And then the other side is just giving lectures, writing out things and explaining, hey, this is how you think about self-defense.

This is how you teach it to your congregants. This is how you answer those questions if it's something you've not thought through. None of us, seminaries don't offer a defense against the dark arts class.

And so it's sometimes people haven't quite thought through that and so how do we, how do you even explain this to your members if they come with those same questions or if one of them gets involved in a self-defense encounter?

How do you minister to them and explain to them what is sinful and what is not? And so kind of all encompassing and just kind of helping church leaders, pastors and whoever else think through those things and get better at it.

Building a Church's Safety Culture Through Discipleship

If a pastor is at, you know, level zero on all this, where does he start on far as bringing his people up to speed? You know, where do you recommend that he begins? I mean, with the preaching and teaching, you know, obviously the view of the sixth commandment is gonna go one way.

What else? I mean, the Baptist catechism is great on what the duties of the seventh commandment do or sixth commandment does a great job of kind of explaining that. So that's a good place teaching wise to kind of orient people's thinking rightly.

And then through that, it's just finding strong men, finding men in your church that you can rely on, finding people that are diligent, right? Like, do you have a guy who's trustworthy to lock the doors?

All right, well, that's a good start. Like you have a guy who's willing to do that, right? And you can work your people in that way of just like, we want strong men. We need to have a biblical understanding of sin because if you don't know what sin is, then a lot of your internal issues might fester and they might exist without you knowing them.

Do you have robust discipleship? Because inviting somebody in your home and talking to them is a good way to find out if they have sin inside of them that can potentially become violent or dangerous for the church.

And then church discipline, if you're not willing to call out sin and you've never demonstrated to your congregation how sin is to be called out or how you're supposed to respond when sin is called out in your own life, then if they see those same issues, how are they gonna react to them?

How are they gonna respond to them? And so a lot of that is just understanding, having a robust understanding of ecclesiology and really harping that and explaining kind of those doctrines there while just finding practically, hey, can you do this?

Can you do that? And small things can make your church a lot safer. And a lot of that stuff that we already do, you already typically have a deacon who locks up or someone who locks up the church, just, hey, can you do this in the middle right before service starts?

Can you lock this door, do this, right? Or we're gonna rotate, hey, just stay by the door in case someone shows up late. Okay, cool. Like now you at least have somebody who's watching the front door, and they can come in later in service.

So things like that are kind of simple. You can have your church do without making the announcement, oh, hey, this is a security guard or this is a safety team guy who is here for this purpose if that might spook some people.

I should mention just so you know and so our listeners know, our guys that rotate at the front door, they're still in the, well, I guess technically they're in a little bitty foyer, but I mean, it's still the same room that we're in.

So they're still engaged in the singing and the work that they do. That works for us.

Yeah, absolutely. And we have guys, we have a room where our cameras are and that guy, we have the service that you can hear the sermon in there, but they're missing some of it. And we understand that.

And so we try to make sure that me and the other deacon who lead our team are very adamant about, hey, check it in on the guys. How is your soul doing? And we make sure, hey, you're only gonna miss one preaching service a month, right?

And we're gonna have you rotate off those positions. And if you're, we have a patrol position, a guy who stands outside and patrols our parking lot. So we have two parking lots, one's across the street.

And like, we just can't see all of it from inside the building. And so like that person misses a decent amount of service, but we only have them do it once every month, we can help it and even more time in between those.

So that way they're in church as much as they can be. And then we try to make sure that we're doing stuff on the backend.

To care for their souls the best we can. Yeah, and I think I wanna say this certainly as a disclaimer, but also for help, but this is not just, all right, y 'all bring your guns to church next week. Now we're secure.

Like there's some legal ramifications, there's some insurance ramifications that like we had to work through and make sure we had to put certain guys on a certain list and say these things in order to protect them and us and all those things.

So that's why having somebody like a company like Kingdom Defense Training would be incredibly helpful to, right? I mean, I don't know if you wanna speak to that more, but Yeah, no, absolutely.

Firearms, Training, and the Responsibility to Protect Life

There's a lot more that goes on to it, especially when you start talking about armed people. And it's interesting is that the churches that do the least amount of like thinking in this area, their fallback plan is, well, everyone's, oh, we have a bunch of guys with guns.

And it's like, well, have you, like that has the most amount of potential problems on it. Whereas like if you had a team of guys with no guns on it, you actually are probably better set up than you are without it.

I remember talking to a guy after the issue at City's Church happened. And he's like, yeah, it wouldn't happen here. We have a bunch of guys with guns. Like you can't just shoot unarmed people who are standing in your church being annoying.

Like that's, what is your other plan? Or they'll say, yes, we have all these guns. Or what happens if someone has a heart attack? You can shoot them? Like that's not, that doesn't work. And so, yeah, the thing with the most liability on it is the thing that everyone just tends to do.

And it's like, that's not enough. And as Christians, I think we should be excellent in what we do. And so if we're gonna have guns on our campus, we should be excellent in the way that we allow that to happen.

And excellent in the way that we police our own members. And so I've had guys on the team that I've said, hey, you don't have a good holster. You don't have good gun safety. I'm not allowing you to carry a gun on the safety team until you've proven yourself through a set of qualifications or skill tests or whatever that we're gonna do.

Because you, I want you to be excellent in what you do. And that's one way we preserve life by not allowing accidents to occur on our own campus with our own negligence and firearms. And so when we talk to our other members about that, we allow them to carry guns if they want to.

And we don't, as long as they're being safe about it, we don't have any of those hard conversations. But we've had people before who would put a gun in a bag and leave the bag unattended. It's like, hey, you can't do that.

Like, A, it's dangerous also. But like, I think you were sinning and carrying a gun in such a reckless manner that anyone could pick it up and use it or a child could find it and be playing around with it.

Like, we have to be excellent and preserve life in everything we do, including carrying a firearm.

Yeah, that's good, man. That's a excellent, excellent word. I know that you've talked about the article you've written, and I don't know if you're gonna address this in your book, but let's just talk briefly because we could spend a whole episode on this, but just about the protection of children.

You know, oftentimes when I think about why should we have safety and security in the church, well, one of the things I'm thinking about is children. I mean, women and children. Like you said about these young, you know, a grown woman in some cases is gonna be able to defend herself, whereas a child, you know, a two, three-year-old child can't.

So I think about that, but I also think about the defense of children actually extends beyond just some sort of event. I mean, the likelihood of a child being harmed in a shooting situation is very, very, very, very small compared to the likelihood of other things that are out there.

So do you cover any of that in your book?

Protecting Children Through Prevention and Pastoral Care

Not specifically, but generally I address it a little bit in when I talk about setting up and understanding sin, right, and preaching against sin and understanding having a robust culture of calling out sin.

And so a lot of those crimes against children that are terrible and awful that make all the news headlines, when you look at them and you say, okay, what happened here? You tend to see a pattern where it's, you know, so-and-so was alone with a child for this time and this happened and this happened.

And it's in a church that understands sin and is willing to address sin, those patterns should be noticed and called out. And a lot of times whenever those things happen, it's because somebody did notice the pattern, but didn't call it out or nobody noticed the pattern because they didn't think it was a big deal.

And so making sure, hey, we have two people in every room with kids in it. We have cameras in all of our classrooms. We have people walking the hallways all the time in our children thing. At no point is an adult other than a parent alone disciplining a child or is a person alone with a child in our church building.

And so just small things like that, that a lot of it is just being good church men and being good church women and having an understanding of that really makes a big difference on that. And then also explaining those things to the children, not being afraid to tell children, hey, there's what's right and there's what's wrong.

Here's how you can think about this. This is how you should think about protecting yourself. We're not expecting them to get into a fistfight with an adult, but still understanding where are the exits at in our church?

What is, if someone comes up to me and they're asking me these questions, why are these wrong? Can we define that? Can we explain that? And I think too often we forget to explain those things. And we preach the gospel very well to our children.

I think sometimes we should preach a little bit more law in there. And I think that would help a lot of those factors be mitigated.

Yeah, that's good. And it's just what I'm hearing from you too is just a encouragement to me as a pastor and just a reminder that theology, theology is not just a church category. It's not just like, oh, this is, theology is just for my quiet time.

It's like, no, no, no. Theology is going to bleed over into every aspect of your life. It's why we need sound theology. It's why we need godly, biblical, reformed theology. It's gonna bleed over. And when you think through the responsibilities of men, the responsibilities of families, the responsibilities of pastors, it's gonna flow into these, it's not just a spiritual aspect, but it flows into the physical as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so, okay, who should get your book?

The Ministry of Defense and Resources for Churches

Anybody, the biggest thing for it is gonna be guys who wanna form teams, right? If you, a pastor who's not, who's thinking about this and realizes, hey, there might be an issue here, but doesn't really know where to start, it's gonna be good for that.

If you're a team leader of a safety team and you wanna make sure that you have an idea of how to make this more of a ministry, it'll be effective for that. And anybody who, maybe you're the member in your church and your pastor isn't sure about these things, you could buy it for them as well.

It's kind of designed to be bought in bulk and shared with a large group of people to kind of talk through these things and work through these things. It's gonna be pretty short. It's only, I think, less than about 100 pages or so, but it covers a lot of just, how do you think about this team?