Congregational Security Threats 101
Why didn’t seminary prepare me to assess security/riot threats in the midst of a national crisis? -Amy E. McCreath
Did we not? Hmm, let me check our curriculum plan here at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School… wow, you’re right. Not a word about threat assessment to be found. Sorry about that, Amy, current Andover Newton students, and all alums of seminaries everywhere. So, what now?
When I was a little girl, a relative sent my sister and me letters on Inauguration Day so we would have stamps and envelopes with the special inauguration postmark for our scrapbooks. Politics had nothing to do with it. Inauguration Day was a national holiday and a celebration for everyone.
Today, I’ve filled my schedule with busyness and plan to listen to the Inauguration proceedings on the radio because I’m simply too anxious to watch. Like you, Amy, I am feeling a bit cheated by… something? someone?… to have lost a day of celebration, and to be expected to know how to lead in such a time as this.
Leading amidst a time for which none of us was trained is going to be the only kind of leadership we have to offer for a generation or more. Call it a liminal time, call it chaos, but nobody has a user’s guide or map. The nonexistence of step-by-step instructions doesn’t mean we can’t create a system for facing that which is new, and such systems can be the difference between panic and sanity on days such as this one, when church and civic leaders are bracing for Capitol Insurrection 2.0.
Many years ago, I wrote my dissertation about how Christian colleges addressed the challenge of designing programs meant to help students discern their vocations. The Lilly Endowment, Inc. put out a request for proposals to colleges, offering them a significant planning grant to design interventions connecting Christian thought with one of the most pressing questions young adults face: “What do I want to do with my life?” In investigating how schools used the planning year, I learned that every school handled the process differently based on their cultures, but a detectable pattern emerged.
The schools each engaged in learning, and they learned fast because they had to. A million-plus dollar grant was on the table, after all, and they didn’t want to leave it there. Their learning included three overlapping phases:
- Learn the best theory available.
- Learn what other respected institutions are doing.
- Consider this particular community’s culture.
I borrowed these steps not long ago when engaged in the complex process of moving Andover Newton from one state to another, and from freestanding to embedded status. I had obviously never taken on a project like that before, nor had others on our team, even our attorney. We didn’t know what we didn’t know that we didn’t know. And yet we trained up, and we pulled it off.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize; this is my first pandemic,” was the excuse I used a lot between March and May of 2020. Now, I no longer apologize when I make missteps based on the uncharted nature of the landscape on which we lead; we’re all doing our best and have nothing to be sorry about. Occasionally, I’ll feel the anger of the community directed at me, the closest thing to a person who’s failed them when that which we try doesn’t work. I hate to let people down, but thinking like a learner lessens the sting.
So, Amy, I guess the only thing we teach in seminary that can help in assessing security threats is we teach our students how to enter the cloud of unknowing and to employ a system for staying there without getting lost. I’ve suggested engaging new challenges as a learner and then rolling out three steps. When I’ve deployed those steps, I’ve at least felt a sense of direction.
We can start building those systems before the crisis happens. For instance, with step 1 — learn the best theory available — we can have good information literacy so that we can find best practices quickly, without having to weed-whack our way through conspiracies and clutter.
With step 2 — learn what other respected institutions are doing— we can have a Rolodex (figuratively, of course… although I actually do have one) of peer institutions and sane colleagues with whom we can confer to see what they are up to.
As for step 3 — consider this particular community’s culture: this is the step where I’ve slipped up most often. We all tend to overestimate our capacity to guess how an institution we think we know will react to unsettling times. Especially in times of physical disconnection like this one, we must triple our efforts to monitor the vital signs of our communities. When an institution’s collective lizard brain takes over in a time of threat, it becomes something very different from what anyone in or out of the context knows. To impose actions that will induce fighting, flying, or freezing helps no one.
Jesus lived in violent times: imperial occupation, bloody consequences for those who resisted. He preached peace because it was needed for people to hear his message. May your congregation find peace today, Amy, so that they might learn, and spread, Good News.
