Spiritual leaders gathered in the Expo Hall at the Strawberry Festival Grounds early Jan. 25 for a free Innovative Training and Consulting “Active Shooter Session.”
Approximately 20 attendees drank coffee and took notes while Andy Ross, a retired Captain from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and Ron Hartley, a retired Colonel from HCSO, gave professional pointers on how to respond to a threat in a place of worship.
“We decided the spiritual leaders need to have this training,” Hartley said. “Unfortunately it’s become much more prevalent than it was in the past. I was a cop 40 years ago and when I started, you never heard of a mass shooting. Now we read about them on a weekly basis, almost.”
He said perpetrators will often look for a “soft target,” a place full of people with little to no security. Thus, his company provides training for businesses, schools, churches or any other group that feels the need for a professional assessment of its property and expert advice. If hired, the group will evaluate each individual property and offer a personalized training.
When the pastors, priests or other leaders walk through the door, Hartley said they will learn step-by-step
responses to take back to their congregation. He wants them to be prepared for both the psychological and physiological responses people go through during a high-stress situation, like one with an active shooter.
“We tell them to be prepared,” Hartley said. “You’re not walking around like a coiled spring, ready to jump out like a ninja turtle. You’re aware of your surroundings, situational awareness. What’s going on around you. If the hair on my neck is standing up for some reason, believe it. Trust it. Trust your instincts.”
The attendees were encouraged to have a plan of action in place for each of their respective houses of worship. During the seminar, attendees asked questions as Hartley and Ross gave a thorough presentation of what to look for and how to respond.
The key, Hartley said, is to not use gory or dramatic tactics to scare lessons into the viewers. Instead, a calm and logical analysis will ensure the advice registers for those in attendance.
“If they leave more scared than when they came in, we failed,” Hartley said. “What we’re doing is we’re teaching them to be prepared. The chances of being in an active shooter situation is, well, you stand a better chance winning the lottery. But people win the lottery every day.”
Essentially, the main advice was to simply be aware of who comes in the door. By practicing situational awareness, the leaders may be able to identify a hostile situation long before the moment turns critical.
Dr. Daniel Middlebrooks, the president and CEO of Chaplaincy Care, Inc. and the lead chaplain for HCSO, partnered with Innovative Training and Consulting to present local spiritual leaders with a free training session.
Middlebrooks was a pastor at Hopewell Baptist Church in Plant City for more than four years. During his time as pastor, the church established a “sheepdog” and “medical” ministry, which ensured the entire congregation was as safe as possible.
“There’s a lot of darkness out there,” Middlebrooks said. “We reflect the light but we can’t close our eyes to the darkness. We need to make sure that we can engage it and protect our people.”
He said even with mass shootings increasing in frequency in the U.S., most people assume it could never happen in their home church. Many of the smaller churches often wrongly believe that, due to their limited size, they wouldn’t be ideal targets. After the November 2017 shooting at a small Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that ideology went out the door.
In 2015, nine people attending Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina were killed by white supremacist Dylann Roof. In 2014, a gunman opened fire at two Jewish affiliated facilities in Kansas, killing three people. In 2008, two were killed after a man fired a shotgun at a children’s musical performance at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
Middlebrooks said society has often found itself devaluing life rather than learning to love one another, a trend he believes will cause shootings and other tragedies to continue to increase in frequency.
Every church in the U.S. should be open to training its people, focus on being aware of its surroundings and get over the fear of intruding in the lives of its visitors, Middlebrooks said.
“It is better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent,” he said.
If someone new sits in the pews, he said the immediate response should simply be to interact with the guest and find out why they are here and what their story is, to fully embrace the textbook definition of fellowship.
“When you’re at church you’re there to worship, to pray and to praise, and you are the most vulnerable at that time,” Middlebrooks said. “The most dangerous place is when you feel the safest. That’s not to make people paranoid. It’s just to keep people aware that darkness is always around you.”