If you’re not thinking about the safety of your faith community, you should be. If you are, then you need to buy Praying Safe: The professional approach to protecting your faith community, the newest book from Grant Cunningham. This time, Grant has help, in the person of Joshua Gideon. Calling upon their vast knowledge and experience, they guide you through the process risk assessment, mitigation planning, and then putting it all together. They remind us that it’s not just about keeping your faith community safe from an active aggressor event, it’s also about protecting them from other threats, be they natural disaster, man-made disaster, or medical emergencies. After brief history on institutionalized religion in this country, they jump right in to the meat and potatoes protecting your flock. They guide the reader in identifying what’s at risk, how to prepare, and why, as soft targets, and by the nature of their existence, religious spaces are hard to secure. How? I’m glad you asked. Utilizing a technique I first read about in a previous book by Cunningham (Prepping For Life: The Balanced Approach to Personal Security and Family Safety), that is, a threat, or risk, assessment. They explain what risk assessment is, and walk you through target assessment, threat assessment, on through risk mitigation planning. This process lets you focus on events that are most likely to happen in your particular situation. The important by-product of this is you focus valuable, limited resources in areas of greatest return, as opposed to just throwing money blindly at the threat, hoping something works. One of the most valuable chapters, in my opinion, is the chapter on selling he idea to the congregation. Selling worship security often can be seen as an affront to our Creator’s will, so the authors walk you through the process, identifying the types of objections you are likely to encounter, building consensus, and educating the congregation. Bringing it all together, the authors present a detailed, 5-step process for getting the job done. If you are serious about protecting your faith community from a variety of threats, from active aggressor to natural disasters to medical emergencies, I urge to make use of this invaluable resource. If you are serious, you need this book. Patrick S. Coons