Get 'em back together! - 015 - 200909

Robert shares information on a subject for planning that almost no church has considered, nor do they have a plan for, and yet it can become a very large concern for both legal and publicity liability after a critical incident. Reunification.

Let’s say the critical incident, whatever it is, is now over. What are your plans to get people back together after the critical event, particularly getting the right children to the right adult? How can we make reunification of loved ones work well? Robert will share two principles and three actions you can take now to be ready.

Transcript

SAFE ZONE PODCAST 015

“Get ‘Em Back Together!”

Hi there. I’m Robert Hurst, and I welcome you to Safe Zone, a podcast that is your one place for sane and practical discussion about making the place where you worship safe and secure. 

In the Safe Zone, we discuss a wide variety of elements regarding safety and security, as well as share practical ideas, integrate concepts from various disciplines, and offer great tips to help create a safe and secure environment everyone seeks where they worship. Safe Zone isn’t just about you. It’s about everyone you love and care for where you worship.

Let’s get right into this episode of Safe Zone.

Welcome back to the Safe Zone. As always, I hope and pray that you are being safe and staying healthy, wherever life has you at this time. 

Before we get into the subject matter today, I want to thank those of you who have sent me emails and texts to share how you have used the information that we talk about in Safe Zone not just for the place where you worship, but also for where you work. Several of you have shared how you use the principles and lessons we teach in your business and even family to help keep them safer. That’s cool! Thanks for the contact and keep the encouragement coming! 

Today’s Safe Zone podcast is going to be just a bit longer than normal because I’m going to share information on a subject for planning that almost no church has considered, nor do they have a plan for, and yet it can become a very large concern for both legal and publicity liability after a critical incident.

Let’s say the critical incident, whatever it is, is now over. What are your plans to get people back together after the critical event, particularly getting the right children to the right adult? How can we make reunification of loved ones work well? And that’s what we’re talking about today - get ‘em back together via a reunification plan and process.

If your place of worship has a smaller congregation, maybe with an attendance of less than 100 people each Sunday, (which, by the way, is the average sized church in America, according to statistics), you may think this subject does not pertain to you, but past incidents have shown that it is important to any place where people come together to worship, regardless of size. So listen up, take notes, and then pass the link to this podcast on to your friends who may worship somewhere else.

The principles of our reunification process we are discussing align with the Standard Reunification Process as set forth by the nationally recognized I Love You Guys Foundation. You can find more on them at Iloveyouguys.org. 

Before we go further, though, let me take just a moment to give a couple of definitions to terms I will use. One is the Standard Reunification Process, or you may hear me refer to it as SRM, and the other is “critical incident.” 

Let me define the last term, first. I use the term critical incident is used to identify any type of emergency activity that might cause you to place your church in a lockout, lockdown, or shelter in place condition, or cause you to have to evacuate the building. Reasons for this could be for anything from a weather-related event to a fire to something just as dangerous. 

Standard Reunification Method, or SRM, refers to a pre-planned, standardized, and coordinated effort to reunite members of families as quickly as it is safe to after a critical event, and especially to make certain the right child goes with the right adult on leaving your church’s care.

If you will remember, in two earlier podcasts, numbers 11 and 12, we discussed how to standardize your response to a critical event when I shared the very easy principles of the Standard Response Protocol, or SRP. If you haven’t listened to those two podcasts yet, I encourage you to do so. SRP is designed to help you quickly move people to a position of safety during your response to the critical incident. SRM, on the other hand, picks up at the end of the event and assists with getting families back together.

For SRM to work properly, I am going to assume you already have plans in place for your church that guides you in moving everyone to a location of safety in a critical incident, if needed. Make certain you consider your response plans based on a list of every crisis event that has happened in the past to your church or place of worship, or one you have had a near-miss with. One example might be a tornado. Another would be a hazardous material incident, or HAZMAT, in the area. Others could be flooding that comes up while people are in the church, or a fire or smoke somewhere in the building. Of course, there is the concern for the people-oriented issues from the fairly benign, mentally challenged person who disrupts things all the way to the active shooter event. 

Once you have your response plan locked in, it’s time to go past that to SRM. There are two guiding principles, and three easy steps for SRM to work well for everyone. Let’s discuss the principles, first.

The first guiding principle is accountability. Accountability is both a principle and a tangible action. You want the accountability factor of everyone doing what they say they will do. But you also want accountability to guide you as you make certain you have a way to account for everyone in the building quickly. For instance, do you normally have a roll list in every room where there is a group that meets regularly? If not, does each room in the building have a clipboard, paper and pen nearby so that a basic list of names in the room could be made at the time of an issue? This accountability of names on a list is particularly critical for the nursery and children’s areas.

Being able to have a solid list of who needs to be accounted for helps you know when...everyone is accounted for! No guessing. None of this, “I thought I saw them here/there/leave.” You know what you’re working with. And someone has to be accountable for making certain this all happens.

The second principle is documentation. That means you need to think about documenting everything in some way, including having a detailed, written plan of how you will release your children back to their parents or designated adult. Depending on size and circumstances, you may be able to make do with a simple checklist, or you may need a fairly detailed plan. Once again, it depends on the size of your church and all the factors involved. 

Yes, I know you would never try to keep a child from the proper family, but you also need to be able to account for who the child actually went with. I have actually heard several first-hand accounts of how a parent under restraining order, or maybe the crazy uncle, or even the next-door neighbor somehow was able to show up and attempt to take a child from the scene of a critical incident. In every case, the party offered a very sincere reason for why they, not the parent, was there. Some you encounter may be legitimate, by the way, and this is why you want to have a clear process for determination and documentation.

For instance, after a critical incident is resolved, it may be one of the grandparents who comes by to reclaim the child from the nursery, while one or both parents are somewhere else on the property. Or how about the teen-aged sibling? Would you just release a child to them? It might be appropriate. It might not. Either way, you need to decide your policy now, and then document it so everyone has a reference point for what to expect.

So very simply, those are your two main guiding principles - accountability and documenting. Now, let’s step over to the three steps you can take starting this week, but before we do so, let’s pause for our mid-stream break for this podcast.

Mid-Stream Ministry Partner Focus-I am very excited about our podcast ministry partner focus today, because this is an exceptional group called Marketplace Chaplains, USA. They are a group that works with companies across the United States and Canada to offer personal support services for all employees and families in the companies they work with. I know these people and to say they are caring, professional, and effective - well, those are three words that are just not strong enough to explain the impact a MarketPlace Chaplain has in the workplace. The group presently has chaplain teams in over 1,000 companies serving over 4200+ locations across the United States and Canada. Their chaplain teams are made up of male, female and ethnically diverse members in order to best relate with client company employee team members in the workplace. And they are also on the cutting edge, using their “MyChap” app to help a client company’s employees connect effortlessly with an assigned chaplain team member 24/7, 365 days a year.

Business person, listen - If you are a business owner or officer who has been seeking a tangible way to care for your employees, you need to contact Marketplace Chaplains, USA, today. You can call them at 800-775-7657, or contact them online at mchapusa.com.

If you are a pastor who has a heart for serving in the marketplace as a chaplain in an authentic and effective way, Marketplace Chaplains is always seeking those with such a heart for ministry as yours to work with the marketplace. Call them today at 800-775-7657, or online at mchapusa.com. 

MarketPlace Chaplains, USA, is one of those ministries I love to tell business people about. In the marketplace of life and business, you always need caring, professional, and effective people, and that’s what you get with Marketplace Chaplains. Give them today at 800-775-7657, or contact them online atmchapusa.com. 

Now, let’s get back to our three action steps we can take now to prepare to get ‘em back together. 

Step 1 - If you have not already done so, put together your list of all the hazards and crises that could create a critical incident for where you worship. Don’t go crazy with things that might happen once in a lifetime, but also do not ignore the issues that can happen any time during the year. You are probably going to be surprised at everything you list, and mentally, you are already on the way to a good response, just by acknowledging it could happen. So, make your list of hazards that could create a critical inciden

Step 2 - Determine what your standardized response is going to be during any critical incident. Let’s face it, places where people worship do not deal with a critical incident every time they gather, so keep your response plans simple and easy so you can both train and refresh at least yearly, preferably more often on those plans. Simplified plans also make it easier for everyone to remember what to do during the actual critical event. Don’t wait, however, for a critical incident to occur before making your plans. In today’s world, that is not only unwise, but can also get your church into legal trouble later if incident victims find out you knew something like this could happen, but you did nothing to prepare for it. 

Step 3 - Outline and finalize how you want to do a reunification method after a critical event and include all ages in that process. Make it a simple, written process that you can quickly hand out to key workers after the incident. Think creatively as you do this. 

For instance, one church I am familiar with has a plan for the nursery during and after a building evacuation for any reason. They know where they’re going with the kids, and how they will protect the children, even in bad weather. After the incident, when the parent or guardian comes to reclaim and reunite with the child, they have a check-in/check-out list every Sunday that they will use for validation, as well as plans to take a quick “good-bye” picture with the child and the parent together before they leave. This way, the church has pictorial, time-stamped evidence trail of who the child was last seen with prior to leaving the nursery evacuation area. This is the kind of out-of-the-box simplicity you need to consider. And then put that simplicity into a plan that you share with everyone and train on regularly.

Okay, so there you have two guiding principles and three steps you can take now to make certain that you can get ‘em back together after a critical incident. You know something? Based on the stories I have heard and witnessed, this podcast about planning and actions you have been listening to is a critical one, but it is also one I truly hope you never have to implement. Because if you do, it means something has gone very wrong where you worship.

Until next time remember to plan, practice, and be ready. The crisis that occurs at the place where you worship may not be your choice. Your response, however, is. Make it a good one.

Stay safe. Stay healthy. And God bless.

That wraps it up for this episode of Safe Zone. Take what you learned and help bring a newfound peace of mind to those you worship with by making it a safer place to worship. 

I have an action request for you, and that is that you go to iTunes, or whatever podcast service you use, and leave us a favorable rating. That really helps us in the overall very crowded podcast marketplace. 

While you are there, be certain to take a moment and hit the subscribe button so you won’t miss a single new episode release. And if you would, take a moment to forward this podcast to your friends and associates that are in your sphere of influence on a daily basis. After all, we’re all in this together, so let’s learn together and grow together.

Until next time, have a great day, have a safe week, and wherever you worship, let’s make it a safe place to worship.

Blessings to you and be safe.

­­­