Why Your Church Safety Team Is Operating in a Silo (and What It’s Costing You)

Article Summary

Safety teams end up isolated for several reasons, but only one is entirely within our control. It builds slowly, costs a church safety team more than most leaders realize, and the fix starts with how we treat the people already serving beside us.

Several years ago, I was sitting at my desk working on our fire evacuation plan when I realized our church safety team had a problem. On paper, the plan looked simple. The alarm goes off, people exit through the nearest door, and the safety team makes sure everyone gets out. Then I started doing the math.

We had multiple campuses with multiple exits and a limited number of safety volunteers on any given Sunday. Our team couldn’t be at every door at once, and we couldn’t move a thousand people through their nearest exit when half of them had never thought about which door that was.

We needed help, and it was already in the building. Ushers and greeters were at the doors and in the aisles. Kids ministry workers already knew which children belonged to which parents. These people knew the building and had relationships with the congregation. And we were operating as if none of them existed.

Fortunately, no incident exposed it. There was no near miss or after-action report. A math problem forced me to look honestly at how we were doing this work, and what I saw wasn’t great. We were a capable team working in a silo, and the silo was costing us.

Why a Church Safety Team Ends Up Isolated

Most teams don’t set out to work alone. There are usually one of four reasons that get us there, and I’ve been guilty of all of them from time to time.

We think we’re the only ones who get it. We have the training and the gear, so we start treating everyone else as people who just greet, park cars, and run cameras and don’t look at them as partners.

We’ve seen untrained help backfire. Many of us tried to involve other volunteers at some point, and it went badly. So we pulled back and decided to handle things ourselves.

Other ministries don’t see safety as their job. That’s rarely their fault. Safety teams were added to churches as separate ministries, and nobody ever told the kids ministry director or the parking lead that they were safety assets too. They were simply never invited.

Protecting our methods turns into protecting our turf. Some operational details should stay close. But “that could compromise our response” is very different from “they don’t need to know,” and it’s easy to drift from one to the other without noticing.

Arrogance Is the One We Control

Three of those reasons have causes outside our team. A bad experience made us cautious. Normal church staffing structures left other ministries separate, not integrated. Operational security gives us real reasons to hold some things back.

Arrogance has no outside cause. It lives entirely inside our own team. Nobody else creates it, and nobody else can fix it. That makes it the hardest reason to admit and the easiest one to start working on, because it doesn’t require anyone’s permission but our own.

How Arrogance Creeps In

Most of us have specialized knowledge. Our teams have been through training other volunteers haven’t, and we think about things most people would rather not. That’s true, and it’s valuable.

The trouble starts when “we have specialized knowledge” becomes “we’re the only ones who can contribute to safety.” The first statement is true. The second one is the silo.

When a ministry team starts seeing itself as separate from and superior to the rest of the church, something has gone wrong organizationally. The church is a body, and every part matters. The safety team isn’t more important than kids’ ministry or hospitality. We have different roles, but we aren’t more valuable. We’re not Navy SEALs. We’re servants in the local church. Look at how often the Apostle Paul called someone a “fellow worker” or “co-laborer.” He consistently kept others on his level, not beneath him.

It happens slowly, and I know because I’ve done it. It starts with legitimate concerns about competence and training. Then we start believing we’re the only ones who can handle real problems. Then we stop listening to anyone outside the team. Left unchecked, we can even start holding ourselves above people on our own team.

That’s when we start missing things.

What the Silo Costs Your Team

None of these costs show up in an incident report. They’re slow leaks, and most teams don’t notice them until they’ve been losing ground for a year.

Information you never see

Your team can’t be in every space at every moment. Other people are, though. Greeters, kids ministry workers, parking volunteers, and the production team all see things every week, and some of it matters to safety.

Imagine a Wednesday night with the parking lot full and the building packed with students. A parking volunteer notices a car in the back corner of the lot that’s been sitting there over an hour, engine off, lights off, with someone inside. He figures safety probably already knows, or that it’s a parent waiting on a kid, so he doesn’t mention it. A greeter noticed the same car in the same spot on Sunday morning. He isn’t sure it matters, so he doesn’t mention it either.

Now imagine the car belongs to a non-custodial parent under a court order to stay away from his daughter. Two people saw the risk building over several days, and neither one told safety. They cared. Nobody had given them a reason to think it mattered or a clear way to report it.

Volunteers who burn out

A team trying to cover everything alone is either thin everywhere or strong in a few places and absent in others. Either way, your people are working too hard.

I’ve watched great safety volunteers walk away from this work because they were exhausted and couldn’t see it getting better. One leader I loved working with told me, “Alan, I got to the point that when I heard that message notification on my phone, I felt resentment.” He wasn’t angry with me, and we’re still friends. But the demands of the role became too much, and a large part of that was on me as his leader. I hadn’t found ways to lighten his load.

A reputation you didn’t earn

Most safety teams are full of good people who love their church. But ask other ministry leaders about the safety team, and you might hear “they always say no” or “they don’t trust anyone.”

That reputation comes from years of working in a silo. When we don’t communicate, other teams fill in the gaps with their own assumptions, and those assumptions are often not generous. It makes everything harder. Volunteers don’t want to join, pastors are slower to fund us, and other ministries don’t want to coordinate with us.

The Way Back

Our church closed the auditorium doors after the service started to keep foyer noise out. The greeters would then put a sign in front of those doors directing people to the entrance at the end of the hall. They often leaned it right against the doors, which blocked an exit path. The safety team would move the sign. The greeters would move it back. It became a point of frustration on both sides.

Finally, we stopped telling them what to do and explained the Why Behind the What. We slowed down with the greeter team, talked them through the fire code and what could happen during an evacuation, and asked them to help us.

It worked. They started placing the sign correctly and even assigned a greeter to stand near the doors and guide people to the other entrances. The frustration disappeared.

The biggest win came months later, when I overheard one of the greeters explaining it to a new volunteer: this is what we do, and this is why we do it. They were promoting safety when I wasn’t even in the room.

That didn’t come from forcing compliance or running a training session. It came from humility: sharing the reason, asking for help, and treating the greeters as partners. If you want to see how that plays out in a real situation, our post on what to do when protesters disrupt a church service shows how much depends on the worship team, production, and pastors knowing their part. And if the arrogance has already shown up in how your team treats people, church safety team accountability covers how to address it.

I go much deeper into building partnerships with each ministry in From Sheepdog to Teammate, but it starts here, with an honest look at how your team sees everyone else.

Key Takeaways

• Teams are isolated for several reasons, but arrogance is the only one that comes entirely from inside the team, which makes it the one you can fix first.
• The slide is gradual. It begins when real expertise turns into the belief that nobody else can contribute.
• A silo quietly drains a team of information, volunteers, and goodwill with the rest of the church.
• Other ministries become partners when you explain the reason behind a request and ask for their help.