On October 27, 2018, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven people during Sabbath morning services. It was the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in American history. Three thousand miles and a few months removed from that morning, Memphis churches are still reckoning with what it means.
I’ve spent the last six weeks talking to pastors, deacons, security volunteers, and professional security consultants across Memphis. The conversations are difficult. Houses of worship are supposed to be sanctuaries, places where people feel safe by definition. Locking the doors and posting guards changes that feeling. Every congregation I spoke with is wrestling with the same question: how do you protect your people without turning church into a fortress?
The Wake-Up Call
Pittsburgh wasn’t the first attack on a house of worship. The 2017 shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas killed 26 people. The 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina took nine lives. These tragedies registered in Memphis. Pastors talked about them from the pulpit. Deacons held hushed conversations in fellowship halls.
What made Pittsburgh different, at least for the congregations I spoke with, was timing. It came after Parkland. After Santa Fe. After a year in which mass shootings dominated the news cycle with relentless frequency. By the time Pittsburgh happened, many Memphis church leaders had already been thinking about security. The synagogue shooting pushed them from thinking to acting.
Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, one of the largest congregations in the Memphis area, had a security team in place well before Pittsburgh. Their operation includes trained volunteers, coordination with Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, and a communication system that covers the sprawling campus. They’re an outlier in terms of resources and planning. Most Memphis churches are smaller, less organized, and working with far tighter budgets.
Volunteer Security Teams
The most common approach among Memphis congregations is the volunteer security team. These are church members, often with military or law enforcement backgrounds, who agree to serve as informal security during services and events.
At a Baptist church near Hickory Hill, I met a team of six volunteers who rotate Sunday duty. Two stand near the main entrance. One monitors the parking lot. One stays near the children’s ministry wing. Two roam the sanctuary and hallways. They wear plain clothes, no uniforms, no visible identification. Most congregants don’t know they’re there.
The team leader, a retired Shelby County deputy, told me they’ve handled a handful of situations over the past year. A man who walked in during a Wednesday night service acting erratically and clearly under the influence. A domestic dispute that spilled into the parking lot after a Sunday morning. A stranger who entered the children’s area and couldn’t explain why he was there. None escalated to violence. The team intervened quietly each time.
This model works when you have the right people. Veterans and retired officers bring training, situational awareness, and the temperament to stay calm under pressure. The risk is when volunteer teams lack those qualities. A well-meaning church member with a concealed carry permit and no formal training is a liability, not an asset. If a real crisis unfolds, an untrained person with a gun in a crowded sanctuary can make a terrible situation worse.
Tennessee’s concealed carry laws are permissive. As of 2019, churches can allow concealed carry on their premises. The default under state law is that carry is permitted in houses of worship unless the church posts signage prohibiting it. Many Memphis churches haven’t made an explicit decision either way, which means armed congregants may already be present whether leadership knows it or not.
Professional Security Options
Some Memphis congregations have opted for professional security guards during services. This typically means hiring a TDCI-licensed security company to provide one or two guards for Sunday mornings and special events like Easter, Christmas, and vacation Bible school.
The cost is manageable for a mid-size church. A single unarmed guard for a four-hour Sunday morning shift runs roughly $60 to $75 through most Memphis security companies. An armed guard costs $80 to $110 for the same period. Over a year of Sundays, that’s $3,000 to $5,700. Add Wednesday nights and special events, and you might reach $7,000 to $10,000 annually.
For a congregation with 200 members tithing regularly, that’s doable. For a storefront church on Elvis Presley Boulevard with 40 members and a pastor who works a day job, it’s not.
Several churches I spoke with have explored a hybrid approach. Professional guards at high-attendance services like Easter and Christmas, supplemented by trained volunteer teams the rest of the year. This keeps costs down while providing enhanced security during the events most likely to attract attention from potential threats.
Training Programs
The quality of a security team depends entirely on training. Recognizing a threat, de-escalating a confrontation, coordinating an evacuation, communicating with law enforcement during an active incident. None of this comes naturally. It has to be practiced.
Several organizations offer church security training in the Memphis area. The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office has conducted active shooter response workshops for faith communities. FEMA offers free online courses through its Independent Study program, including IS-360 (Preparing for Mass Casualty Incidents) that’s directly relevant to houses of worship.
Private training companies have also entered this space. Church security consulting has become a growth niche nationally since 2017. Some of these firms offer legitimate, scenario-based training. Others are closer to motivational speakers who take offering-plate money and leave behind a binder nobody reads. Vet any training provider carefully. Ask for references from other churches. Ask about the instructors’ credentials and experience.
One pastor in Midtown told me his church hired a security consultant for a half-day assessment. The consultant walked the property, identified vulnerabilities (unlocked side doors during services, no communication system between buildings, blind spots in the parking lot), and recommended fixes. The assessment cost $500. The fixes, mostly procedural changes and a few hundred dollars in hardware, were completed within two weeks. He called it the best money the church spent all year.
Practical Steps for Memphis Churches
Based on my reporting, here’s what I’d recommend for any Memphis congregation that hasn’t addressed security yet.
Start with a vulnerability assessment. Walk your property during a service. Note every unlocked door, every blind spot, every unmonitored entrance. Think about what someone with bad intentions would see when they approach your building.
Identify your team. You likely have members with relevant backgrounds. Approach them privately. Most veterans and former officers I spoke with said they’d gladly volunteer if someone asked. The key is asking, and then organizing them into something structured rather than informal.
Establish a communication plan. Radios are cheap and effective. A basic set of two-way radios costs under $100 and gives your team the ability to coordinate in real time. Designate one person to call 911. Designate another to manage evacuation. Practice this.
Address the children’s ministry. This is non-negotiable. Whoever is in the children’s wing during services needs a lockdown procedure, a way to communicate with the main security team, and a plan for reuniting children with parents. Check-in and check-out systems for children’s ministry aren’t just about security threats. They prevent custody disputes and unauthorized pickups.
Create a relationship with local law enforcement. Invite your neighborhood precinct commander to tour your facility. MPD and the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office have community liaison programs. Use them. When officers know your building layout and your security team’s faces, response time during a crisis drops.
Lock your doors. This sounds obvious. It isn’t happening at most churches I visited. Propping open side doors for latecomers is common. So is leaving fellowship hall entrances unlocked during services. Funnel everyone through a monitored main entrance. Yes, it’s less welcoming. It’s also safer.
The Theological Tension
Every pastor I interviewed acknowledged the same discomfort. Churches preach openness, welcome, and radical hospitality. Posting guards and locking doors feels contradictory to that mission.
A senior pastor at a large East Memphis church put it this way: “We tell people to come as they are. We tell them this is a safe place. And then we put a guy with a gun in the lobby. I understand why we do it. I hate that we have to.”
That tension won’t resolve cleanly. It’s the reality of ministry in 2019. The congregations that handle it best are the ones that treat security as an extension of care rather than a departure from it. Protecting your people is an act of love. Pretending threats don’t exist isn’t faith. It’s negligence.
Eleven people went to worship in Pittsburgh on a Saturday morning and didn’t come home. Memphis congregations owe it to their members to make sure that never happens here.