Security for a building whose whole purpose is to stay open.
Every other kind of facility can solve a security problem by letting fewer people in. A house of worship cannot. That constraint is the actual work, and it is why a generic commercial assessment does not transfer.
Openness is not the vulnerability. Being unprepared for it is.
A congregation advertises when it will be full, publishes the address, and holds the door for a stranger on purpose. None of that is a flaw to fix. That is the place working the way it is supposed to. Any recommendation that ignores it gets quietly ignored right back by the people who live in the building.
The question is never how to close the building. It is what happens in the first ninety seconds after something goes wrong in a building that stays open on purpose. Who notices. Who moves. Which door two hundred people reach for, and whether it is locked. Whether the guy at the entrance knows he is the first line of anything.
That is a different assessment from counting cameras, and most of what comes out of it costs nothing. Which entrance is the one that is actually used. Where the greeter stands. What the hedge has grown over. What staff have been told, and whether it is written down anywhere.
We come when the building is full.
A walkthrough of an empty sanctuary on a weekday morning describes an empty sanctuary on a weekday morning. It will not show you the side door propped open for the caterer, the parking that spills onto the street, the classroom wing that is unlocked during religious school, or the fifteen minutes after a service when the whole congregation is standing in one place outside the front doors.
We schedule visits across different days and hours, at least one of them at peak occupancy, and we agree in advance how we do that without becoming a presence at your service. Discretion during the visit is part of the job.
- 01
Perimeter and approach
Property line, lighting, sightlines, and what a person can see and reach from the sidewalk and the street before they are on your property at all.
- 02
Entrances during a service
Which doors are used, which are propped, who is watching them, and what happens at the doors when a service lets out and everyone is in one place.
- 03
Vehicles and standoff
Where cars get, how close, and how drop-off flows on your highest traffic day rather than an average one.
- 04
Children and separate wings
Religious school, childcare and classroom spaces are often on a different schedule and a different lock plan from the main sanctuary. They get assessed as their own problem.
- 05
People and protocol
Greeters, volunteers, any contracted guard presence, and whether the written protocol matches what actually happens on the ground.
- 06
Law enforcement coordination
Your existing relationship with the local agency, response expectations, and whether anyone on staff knows who to call and what to say.
Embassy standards, applied to a sanctuary.
Every in-person assessment we run is conducted by a Marine Security Guard veteran with overseas embassy security experience, including the embassy in Kabul. Embassy security is the job of keeping a building safe while it stays open and accessible to the public. The specific measures do not carry over to a congregation in Orange County. The method does. Assess the actual building, at the actual hours, against how it actually gets used.
We are not a security company that added consulting later, and we do not sell anything we recommend. There is no commission, no vendor relationship and no referral fee anywhere in our work.
What congregations ask us first.
We want to stay welcoming. Will an assessment turn our building into a fortress?
No, and an assessment that tries to is a bad assessment. A congregation that feels like an airport checkpoint has traded away the thing it exists for.
Most of what we recommend costs little or nothing: changing which door is the one people actually use, moving where a greeter stands, fixing a sightline that a hedge has grown across, writing down what staff should do in the first ninety seconds of a problem. We recommend free and low-cost fixes before equipment, every time, and the report is sequenced by cost tier so you can see exactly what the cheap half looks like.
Do you visit during services?
Yes, and this is not optional. A building at nine on a Tuesday morning is not the same building as a Friday evening or a Sunday morning. Doors that are locked all week are propped open. Parking overflows onto the street. Two hundred people are inside instead of four.
Assessing only the empty building tells you about the empty building. We schedule at least one visit at peak occupancy, and we work out with you in advance how we do that without being a presence at your service.
Is our congregation eligible for grant funding?
Houses of worship are explicitly included in both the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program and California's CSNSGP. For the California program, religious institutions generally qualify without having to produce an IRS determination letter.
Both programs require a site-specific vulnerability assessment as part of the application, which is the document we write. More detail is on the grant assessment page.
Who sees the report?
Only the people you name to us in writing. We deliver assessments encrypted, never as an open email attachment. We do not publish client names. Photographs taken on your property go into your report and nowhere else, and never into marketing without your written permission.
This matters more for a congregation than for most clients, because the document is a written inventory of where your building is weakest and when the most people are inside it. We treat it as exactly that. We will sign your NDA, or provide ours.
Are you going to try to sell us cameras?
We cannot. We hold no vendor relationships and take no commission or referral fee on anything we recommend. We are also not licensed to sell or install alarm systems, and we do not provide guard services. Those requests get referred out.
You are paying for an objective read of your building. That only has value if the person doing the reading has nothing to gain from the answer.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
Price depends on the property: one building is not a multi-structure campus. The first conversation is free and that is where we work out scope, timing and a number.
On timing, the site visits happen across several days and the written report follows within two weeks of the final visit.
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