Whether you run a church or you are a senior
member of the congregation, you want to make sure that you have created a safe
environment for people to worship. In the event of an emergency situation, you
want to make sure that everyone is properly protected. You also need to protect
the building and its contents too. Taking all this into account, here are a few
easy ways to protect your church.
Identify
Trained Professionals
It helps to give you enormous peace of mind to
identify people who can help in an emergency situation. For
example, do you have any doctors or medical professionals among you? If not,
the very least that you will want is a trained first aider. You may also want
to identify anyone with a military, police, or security background. Also,
people with experience in fire safety or natural disaster response can prove to
be life-saving. Once you have identified these people, you need to ask if they
are prepared to help in an emergency situation. A lot of the time, they will be
more than happy to do this.
Identify
Your Entrances and Exits
Just like any other building, you should identify
your key entrances and exits. This way, you can get everyone out of the church
as quickly as possible in the event of an emergency. Someone will need to take
the lead in guiding the congregation towards these ports, so make sure that you
have assigned this task out.
Insure Your
Church
In the event that a disaster does occur, you need
to protect the assets as best you can. Dedicated
church insurers can help out significantly here. After
all, you want to get everything up and running again at the earliest possible
opportunity and ensure that you can get replacements where needed. The loss of
a church in a community can be significant, and it is something that you don’t
want to risk if you can help it.
Run
Emergency Scenarios
Another useful activity can be to run our a
serious of emergency scenarios to give you an
idea of what you would do in the event of a disaster of some kind. While you
can’t simulate the pressure of the real event, you can still get a better idea
of your response and how you can improve it. Once you have run something
through in a trial capacity a few times, it is then easier to spring into
action if you need to.
Get an
Expert Opinion
It is also worthwhile inviting a few people from
emergency services such as fire marshals, law enforcement, paramedics etc to
your church. This way, they can give you their professional advice for anything
that can be improved to make the whole environment even safer for your
congregation.
Protecting your church is certainly a worthwhile
activity in keeping it going strong for years to come. These are just some of
the ways that you can achieve this goal.
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