Welcome to Man Talk, brought to you by TAWCMN, talking and walking Christian men's ministry, where they're devoted to breaking down the walls of race and denomination, and challenging men to take their God-assigned role. Here's our hosts Will Hardy and Roy Jones Jr., a black guy and a white guy.
Good afternoon. This is Roy Jones Jr. I'm the white guy. And I'm Will Hardy, the black guy.
We appreciate you joining our show. This is week two. We're joined by Ben Ziegler, head of security at First Christian Church in Connersville, North Carolina. And Ben's one of these many servants of God. He's bivocational, if you will.
Got a full-time job at church, taking care of the security of the facility and the people there, and also works a full-time day job. We'll leave that at that. So we don't want to disclose, might give away his many secrets here. But Ben, thank you for joining us. As we left last week's show, I think we were concluding on some of the topics about the shootings and some of the stuff that had gone on at the South Carolina church and some of the numbers and what the right security person might look like. So with that, welcome back. Ben, what have you got on your mind today?
I appreciate you guys having me. I think to pick up on a topic from last week is that this really is about effective ministry. It's not just about having some guy with a gun. If you look at it in terms of a ministry, then the question is really very broad. How do you build an effective ministry? It all starts with leadership commitment. It starts with the leadership of the church committing, understanding the need, and looking for somebody who's going to drive that ministry. Ministry just doesn't happen.
At that point, then, that ministry leader really needs to understand and be intentional about what they want to do, understanding what types of people—we talked a little bit about this last week—what types of people do we need on this ministry? What are their functions? What are the purposes?
That's not all of it, though. You have to be intentional, and you have to train. There has to be a training program. What does a training program give you? Well, it gives you consistency. The minister wants to know that while he's up there in a pulpit on the stage, that the people that have committed themselves to keeping that worship area safe are going to be consistent, and they're going to do things the same way. And so that's why training really comes into play.
And you know something, Ben? When you talk about training, I remember when I was in the military, and we know when you were talking about last week how training and you want to have diversity on your security team, and you equated that to the police department. And you know, police have to train on their weapons every now and then. So if they have to train on their weapons every now and then, I remember in the military, we had to qualify once a year.
You had to take your M-16 if that was your assigned weapon, or your M-60 if you were assigned that weapon, or even your M-45 if you were assigned that weapon, and you had to qualify again on the range. So it's no different than those areas. Absolutely. We spend a lot of time in training as an all-volunteer group. One of the things that we do every year is to work on de-escalation. Now, that's a big word, and people think, well, wait a second, I probably will never use that. If you've got a teenager, you understand de-escalation. If a teenager comes in and they're all hot and excited about something, you need to talk them down to where they're going to listen. That's what we want our people to do when there's an issue at church and somebody is not happy with the message.
Somebody has had some counseling that they heard something from the minister that they didn't agree with, or something else has gone on where they're not thinking rationally. You need to be able to assess that situation, and you need to de-escalate that situation before it gets worse. Well, you know, that's one of those things when you think about de-escalation. Most men, and I will stereotype a little bit here, it takes a lot longer to get them to de-escalate than it does a lady, I think. Of course, there's exceptions to both sides of that, right? But that's good, Ben, that you share that, because most people don't think about part of handling situations as de-escalating. They think of handling situations as putting it down, whatever that means.
If that's a physical altercation or if that's deadly force, depending on what the severity is of the other piece of it. So it's good to know you folks are actually going through that step of the process. We think that that's critical.
That also gives you a chance to understand the situation and to try to minister more. Now, can we go to zero to 60 very quickly and physically address a situation? Absolutely. We don't want to go there. We would much rather bring this down verbally.
Right. And I know just recently, having watched what you guys had to deal with at one of our recent events, it wasn't a bad thing. It was people had come in not realizing that the church had a policy about no concealed guns. And Ben's team had to deal with one or two situations on a Friday evening, as we were first getting started with the event, with people being very upset. They've got their concealed carry. They're qualified to carry a gun under cover, but yet the church has a policy about no concealed weapons. But you all were able to handle it nicely. In fact, even the folks that got a little bit upset came back the next day and apologized for the way they had behaved or responded to them, especially once they saw the infrastructure that was in place and started to realize that they were protected, as was all the speakers, and that they could feel safe coming into the church.
Which that's a great thing, too, for here's visitors coming in that have not been there at all, and then for them to immediately, within a reasonable amount of time, assess and realize that they're in a safe environment. And, you know, Will, you said something about the practicing piece and qualifying. I think that's something, if you're listening to the phone or to the show tonight or today and you're a concealed carry person, I would like to just address something, if we may, here. There's a whole lot of difference in going to a target range and qualifying to be a concealed carry person, and actually being trained to pull a gun in a combat type situation or in an altercation type situation with the adrenaline moving and all the moving parts at the same time. So if you're concealed carry and you enjoy being able to do that, I would encourage you to seek out the next level training so that you have a better understanding and a better clarity on what it means to be in real life situations and be expecting to draw and shoot accurately and think on your feet, if you will. Because it's a whole lot different, Ben.
You can certainly comment here, but just a word of encouragement there. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, paper static targets don't move much. No, don't shoot back. They really don't, and you don't get a lot of excitement. Your heart rate doesn't really get up when you start trying to be able to effectively protect somebody, be it in a church, be it in a home, be it in public. You want to be able to shoot through, learn how to handle elevated heart rate, handle noises, handle movement.
Not every shot's a good shot. If you've got people walking in front, you have to be able to assess that, and you don't get that way unless you practice that way. So what then would be that next level in the process?
Take us back to that. I think we were talking, we had talked about training, we had talked about, you know, leadership, being intentional and that type thing. So what would you look for next in building this security program? After you start with the leadership and you've got a ministry leader and you've got a church plan so that the team knows that the church leadership is behind them, we have to select the people, understand who we want, we select those, we interview them, we do background checks. Then we start with training. Now, you can't train for every scenario, but, you know, we want to make sure that we can properly handle fire alarms. We want to make sure we can properly handle a medical situation. Those are going to happen a lot more than a gun situation. But then at that point, when your team is more mature and people understand what each other is going to do, you have assigned roles on the team, different positions in the church, and then if the church leadership decides that they want to have part of a component that is armed, there has to be a full assessment of that plan that needs to be written, needs to bring in the church attorney, and it needs to be very, very intentional. And we have relied on talking to people that are current law enforcement, retired law enforcement, to understand the policies that were in place for them to try to bring in best practices, what makes sense, what's tried and true. This is a real big responsibility, and it's not just, I want you to carry a gun.
Very intentional. We have an entire process that takes months for somebody to be selected and for them to go through a process. There's no way you can replicate for a non-professional law enforcement officer the 400 hours that they're going to get at BLET, but there's a part of it that you can take them through to ensure that the church is making a wise decision when it asks somebody to put their life and other lives on the line by carrying a firearm. That's a tremendous responsibility.
The church ultimately has that liability if they put that plan in effect. You know, when you speak about responsibility about carrying a firearm, God put on my heart, we need to call that out too right here, is that if you're a handgun owner or a firearm owner, ensure and make sure that those guns are locked up, and if you're one that says, well, I've got to have access to it, well, there are safes that will be able to be put beside your bed, easy access to get into a loaded handgun or to a handgun to get access to for home defense. Please, please, please just make sure you know where your guns are at and make sure they're locked up and secured.
Absolutely, Roy, because, you know, safety, security or safety is a part of security, being safe, you know, with the weapons that you're handling and being safe and also with our words, because our words can be weapons of warfare. So, you know, we have to understand and, you know, we've been talking about intentionality and we've been talking about leadership, we've been talking about the fruit of the Spirit on the last show, and all of these components, I think, make up what Ben is talking about here in reference to a security plan and looking for the right people and training and getting those elements in place. So we're talking about church security and people, this is a serious issue, if you're listening right now and you don't have any type of security program or plan in place, then what should a person do, Ben, if they don't have one in place or if they're looking to get one in place? Where do they have to go or who do they have to talk to? If God lays this on somebody's heart, they need to talk to their minister, they need to start by making sure that the church leadership understands that there is a serious need to protect the flock, and if you go to your minister and they don't feel that there's a need to protect the flock, you've got bigger issues. But they need to get that support, there's a lot of resources online, there's local churches who are willing to help to have the conversation, how do you start this, they could contact us at First Christian, we'd love to have the conversation, to help churches understand this process. It is a process, you have to be intentional to have an effective ministry and this ministry is no different. The main thing is to understand this is ministry first.
That's good, Will, good question. Ben, mirror back real quick, so you're available if someone needs access to some resources and to kind of start the process of how to do this. And again, it's Ben Ziegler and you can reach him through First Christian Church, just leave a memo and a message there with your phone number, he'll reach back to you. And we'll get ready to take a break here in just a moment. This is Roy Jones, thank you so much with Will Hardy and Ben Ziegler and we'll be back here in just a moment. This is Host Church, First Christian Church in Kernersville, 1130 North Main Street in Kernersville. They have a hard start at seven o'clock and a hard stop at eight o'clock. First time visitors eat for free.
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Call 336-885-1987. Welcome back to our show. I'm Roy Jones.
And I'm Will Hardy. And we've got our guest Ben Ziegler with us for part two of a two week show. So this is the second week, second part. And what we're going to do is we're going to loop back around on the church security piece.
During break we were chatting about the next things we'd like to share with you a little bit about. Part of the church security piece, Ben, what you were just sharing about the elderly folks. Obviously they can get disoriented, you know, and then certainly if they're there with one of their loved ones that may be younger that's caring for them or a partner or spouse that's not suffering. They could get separated and that's part of what you're saying is helping to relocate, get them back with their loved ones and the same for children, I guess. So why don't you give us a little bit about that and then we'll step into the next conversation.
Sure. As you look at this as a ministry, I think that it's also important to understand is creating a safe worshipful environment means making sure that everybody is there to be able to worship. If you are a parent and you can't find your child or if your parent wanders off, that does not allow you to be in a worshipful environment. And so a good safety ministry will be effective in making sure that kids and seniors get back to where they need to be very quickly.
We actually practice this drill and we've got a time limit that if we can't find, especially that kid, with the next number of minutes, we're going to call 911 and get KPD to come and assist us. But we practice that because we want to make sure that our kids are safe and healthy. That's part of the ministry.
That's part of ensuring a safe, worshipful environment. Well, what about being emergency response with respect to, you know, hurricanes, tornadoes, those type things? How would the security team ministry act or play a role in those things?
Well, there's two aspects that I think that this comes into play. One, if there's a situation, a weather situation while we're at church, we understand the challenges and the scenario and we can best assess and get people moved to the right place in a very quick timeframe. Obviously, we have radio communication among the team and staff and we can affect those movements very quickly. The other thing that we've done is we've gone out as a team. Part of our team has gone out to help outside the church when there are issues in the community. And again, it's ministry. It's not just within our four walls.
It can be anywhere. And that gets back to the heart of what we do as ministry. So along the response team piece, what about, are you, your teams and you individually as the leader, is your team responsible for responding in the event there's a heart attack, a medical issue? You say someone goes down during the service in the sanctuary.
It could be a heart attack, stroke, whatever. Are your team, is your team the one that responds to this and are your people, is that part of their training also CPR and all those different components? We have a separate medical response team.
We're fortunate to have several MDs in the congregation. And so we have a very solid medical response team. And so my team's responsibility is to get the medical personnel notified, get them there, get our medical bags, which we have stationed throughout the building to that patient. And it's going to be like a police officer on the scene of a wreck. They're going to be there until medical personnel arrive. Then they're going to clear the scene, make sure that ambulance, fire truck can get in there safely and efficiently.
And so that's how we work together with the medical team. You know, I need to call out to Ben, this is related, but I don't think I've shared this with you. But the morning that we had our last Friday morning talk and breakfast, there was a septic tank truck. I think he had a car up there at the intersection right in front of the church building. And one of your team was actually texting me while he was up there. And of course, unfortunately, I didn't see it till after we were done with breakfast because I had it on silent. But he had texted and said, Hey, I'm up here.
I was trying to get to breakfast. I just saw this accident right in front of me. He responded, was there to help ahead of the EMT and the fire department arrive. And then also helped assist with the extraction of the person who had apparently been pinned into a car. And just again, here folks, it's not just in the building of the church or inside the walls for ministry.
It's outside the walls for ministry. And plus, you never know, you might be the difference in someone being alive or not making it if you step forward and allow God to use you properly. And that morning that that happened, I was on the way to work and wasn't able to get to the breakfast. But that same gentleman saw the accident, was the first on scene, called 911, assessed the situation. Then when help got there, I think he had texted you, but then he called me and he described what happened. He said, I know there's nothing you can do, but you can pray. And he said, can you get the rest of the team to pray?
And we've got apps that we use for communication instantly to our full team. And so as soon as he was able to break free, he, because of the ministry heart, his focus was on getting as many people that could pray for that lady as possible. And that gets back to that ministry mindset. And that's a great point.
And ironically, one of the guys who did make it into breakfast told us that it had just happened out there and he was a little bit behind, I think, Son. And he called that out as a request when we were closing up that morning that we were sure to pray for him. So to your point, the prayer chain had gotten moved around pretty extensively and it was good to see Son pushing that out as well. So Roy, you know, we've been talking about church ministry and we want to end up this last segment to say that security doesn't stop within the four walls of the church.
Right. And men, you have to be at the forefront of this. God has placed you as the head of your household and you need to be listening. You need to be listening and acting on some of these things because God has placed you as that individual, you know, to protect your family. So Roy, when we talk about security outside of the four walls, you know, for that man who's listening right now, what kind of mindset should he take on, you know, with respect to his Christian role as head of the household?
What type of mindset do you think that individual needs? Well, to your point, Will, he is responsible for the care of his flock, which is his family. And he is the protector.
So from my standpoint, my vantage point, I see it and there's several facets. I think it's the emotional health, it's the spiritual health, and then it's the physical health. And, you know, the physical health is that I am responsible for protecting them. So I lock my house down.
I have, you know, multiple facets of protection, which includes an alarm system and other ways to monitor what's going on around my house. And that's part of my role as the father and the husband. The second piece of it is, and which we don't talk much about, is that spiritual and emotional security that we need to be clear on, too. And we'll come back to that in just a moment. But from the practical standpoint, I think it's perfectly all right. Now, people can debate about guns and all that sort of thing, whether or not you should have them. That's your personal choice.
God's given me peace about that journey, so I'm okay with it. If you choose not to be okay with it, that's all right as well. But you still need to be responsible for physically protecting your family. So my question to the men would be, what would you do if someone came inside your house and you're not prepared to deal with it? And we even go so far as to practice it, my wife and I, because I want her to be in the mindset that if it's 3 o'clock in the morning something happens, that you've got some level of practice in your mind of what needs to take place.
And then as the father and the husband, you should do the same with your children. You should teach them a safe place to try to hide if the alarm goes off or where to go. Where's the safe place, at least the safest place in that moment to get to that's probably least likely to be found or spotted. And then control the perimeter. As soon as you know there's an intrusion, secure the safety of your wife, and then you're responsible for the next step.
That means finding out where the intrusion is, who it is, and what's going on. And that means being the man, and I hope not to offend anybody here, but it means being the man of stepping out and putting your family behind you. And you step in and no greater love than a man lay down his life for a friend slash family slash child. So Ben, being the head of security, how do you carry over those security measures and things that you have been trained in to the home?
Two-fold, I would say. First, and this is a daily struggle for a lot of us, the single best method of protection for my family is to ensure that I bring God into that house. Better than a gun, better than a dog, better than an alarm system, can protect against anything.
And I do better when I make God the center of my life and my house. But just like Nehemiah, he prayed and posted a guard, I'm going to take aggressive steps in my house to ensure that from a physical standpoint, my house is guarded. And as Roy said, it's many layered, but I'm going to do everything I can to protect my house and protect my family. And Roy, when you were talking about, that's something I think that most men probably don't do enough of is to practice the plan.
Go through it several times and look at your points of entry. That could possibly be, and if a person is here or if you're in the bed or if you're in the bathroom, this is how you should respond. You can lock doors or barricade doors or do those things that's in your plan to go through. So I would encourage men to get a plan if you don't have one and then practice that plan because as we said before, and Roy, you play football, that most coaches in this country, if not all of them, won't let you play on game day if you hadn't practiced.
No, they won't. We always had a few that would fake some injuries just so they have to go through the harder week. But yeah, you're exactly right, Will. And back to Ben's point, which I was leading to about spiritual health, that's first and foremost. And then the other piece is not just from the violent piece, it's practicing in the sense of an emergency. We're in the middle of a crisis globally right now, and what are you talking to about with your family?
How are you getting them rehearsed for that? But in the more immediate sense, what happens if you have a fire and you're in a two-story house and you haven't talked to your kids about where they should go or how you're going to react when a fire alarm goes off? I lost two cousins when I was eight years old to a two-story frame house fire, and they had never practiced it, large family, six children, and two younger ones didn't make it.
One crawled underneath the daybed, the other one crawled underneath her bed in her bedroom. And they burn up, and my uncle went through a very tough time, as did my whole family. But the point being, had they practiced, there would have been a sequence of events that would have taken place. They had old enough children that could have got all the kids. The parents were in the lower level, the kids were upstairs. The older kids could have got all the kids to the right end of the house. Parents could have came outside and done what they would have done. But in this case, he ended up going through the fire, my uncle, to get up to there.
By that time, he was burned quite a bit and couldn't chase the other two kids, got the ones that could get out. So preparedness is the key, whether it's in your church, in your home, and those are the things we need to be thinking about, whether it's spiritual security or physical security. And men, you're responsible for both of those.
Absolutely. You know, Roy, when you're talking about, in reference to the two-story, they have these ladders now that you could just buy them. They're not expensive at all. And I mean, when you think about that and you say, what's the cost of a life when you can go out and purchase something that could potentially save a life? And some people would say, well, why should I invest in something like this? Well, you don't know what could happen.
And so you'd have to be on guard and at least have the insight that if I don't practice this and then I get into a situation to where I have to do something, then you have no plan. That's right. Well, Will, it's been a great pleasure spending the show with you again. Will always is my brother from a different mother. And Ben, it's been our honor to have you for two weeks with us as a guest. We thank you so much for your service at your church and thank you so much for your time here with us today. And we just hope and wish you the very best. Thank you.
I really enjoyed spending time and talking about something critical to everybody. Thank you, Ben. All right. And we thank you for joining us here on ManTalk Radio and join us again next week. Thank you. I'm Roy Jones.
And I'm Will Hardy. And we'll see you next time. As we wrap up today's show, be assured that TAWCMM, Talking and Walking Christian Men's Ministry, is building a community of men that are Christ followers with a desire to be servant leaders in their homes, communities, churches, and work environments. Check out our website for upcoming events and regularly scheduled meetings. Drop us a note for topics that you would like to have us visit in the future. Thank you for joining us on ManTalk today. Visit us at www.tawcmm.com. Men walking the talk.
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