What About the Little Ones? The Side of Church Safety We Don’t Want to Face

When a church finally starts taking safety seriously, the conversation almost always begins in the same place: doors, exits, and what to do if someone dangerous walks in on a Sunday morning. That preparation matters, and I’m glad churches are having it. I’ve spent years as a first responder and I run my own church’s security team, so I will never tell you to stop planning for the worst.

But somewhere in all that planning, I want us to stop and ask a question we tend to rush past. We talk a great deal about protecting the building and the gathering. What about the little ones? What about the children we were entrusted to care for?

A trust more sacred than we treat it

Every Sunday, parents do something remarkable. They hand us their children. They walk their sons and daughters down the hall to a classroom, kiss them goodbye, and trust that the people in that room will keep them safe. That trust is one of the holiest things a church is ever given. When we told those parents “your kids are safe here,” we made a promise. Most of our safety work, in the end, is just the question of whether we meant it.

Scripture never treats children as an afterthought. Jesus welcomed them, lifted them up, and saved some of his most severe words for anyone who would do them harm. If the Lord takes the little ones that seriously, so must the church that bears his name.

The truth we would rather not face

Here is the part we don’t want to sit with. The greatest danger to the children in our care has rarely been the stranger who forces his way through the front door. Far more often, it has been someone we welcomed. Someone who volunteered, smiled, shook our hands, and asked to help with the kids.

For decades, child sexual abuse has been among the leading causes of lawsuits against churches. Ask the insurance companies who actually carry that risk. Their answer to it isn’t more cameras or armed guards. It’s screening volunteers, training them, and keeping clear policies. The people who pay the claims know exactly where the children are most exposed.

We don’t want to believe it could ever be one of us. It feels like a betrayal of our own hospitality to even think it. So we let warm trust do the work that careful diligence should be doing. But love does not get to look away from what is hard. Guarding a child is not suspicion. It is faithfulness to the trust their parents placed in our hands.

Why I won’t separate the two

This is why I can’t treat “security” and “protecting our kids” as two different projects. The team watching the doors and the volunteers sitting on the floor of the preschool room are doing the same work, answering the same question: do we truly know the people around our children are who they say they are, vetted and trained and accountable?

So prepare for the threat in the headlines. Please do. But do not let the rare and dramatic distract you from the quiet, daily diligence of knowing exactly who is close to the little ones. That is where the real promise to those parents is kept or broken.

Everyone who serves should move through the same path—recruited, screened, trained, and accounted for—whether they stand at the entrance or read a picture book to four-year-olds. Not because we think the worst of people, but because we will not leave the most precious among us exposed to a risk we could have caught.

The real measure

The measure of a church’s safety isn’t whether it’s ready for a catastrophe that may never come. It’s whether the mother who hands you her child on Sunday morning can trust that you guarded that child as if she were your own.

The little ones were entrusted to us. Guarding them well is not fear. It is love, refusing to look away.