Disaster preparedness begins at home and with each one of us. Planning is an essential part of readiness. Having plans that cover multiple situations and events is very useful during times of disaster. Plans should include emergency communications, how we receive alerts and warnings, evacuation routes, emergency kits, supplies, and regular training to ensure that members and leaders stay updated to compensate for our changing world, environment, and personal situations. Our planning should include how we will protect ourselves and our property and how we will manage risk. The benefits of being prepared and planning for disasters are many, and taking action to protect yourself, your family, and your congregation will have long-lasting effects on your community well into the future.
Are You Ready?
Readiness starts with us being prepared when disaster strikes. As individuals and Christians, we must be spiritually, emotionally, and physically prepared. Often disasters occur when we are not at home or with our families, so we must be prepared. Having a personal evacuation plan for your specific and frequented locations (like work, gyms, and grocery stores) and other critical information needed to get you safely and quickly back to your family is essential. Have a kit/go-bag with enough supplies to sustain you until you can reunite with your family. Your kit should have at least three days of supplies, including water, food, medications, and critical documents—like medical cards, cash, and other items to sustain you (see appendix for details).
Actions to keep you prepared for disaster include having the right skills to react quickly to situations, so take time to review publications like FEMA’s “Are You Ready?” guide and websites like Ready.gov to learn how you can prepare.
Family Readiness
To prepare you and your family for a disaster, it’s essential to consider the needs of children, the elderly, and those with disabilities. Ensure your plans and checklists are up to date and contain the necessary contact information and essential information like evacuation routes, gathering places, and pet safety plans. Ensure your family kit can sustain you for up to two weeks. Additional considerations include how you and your family will receive warnings and alerts, shelter-in-place procedures, family reunification plans, and other key areas you and your family may identify when planning. Finally, review and practice your plans regularly to ensure they are sufficient for the types of disasters you may encounter in your area. Whether it’s your hometown or your vacation, planning for a disaster is essential.
Congregational Preparedness
Now that we have prepared ourselves and our families for a disaster, we can spend time preparing our house of worship and congregational family for a disaster. The first step in preparing your congregation is to understand that it is a process that will require time and effort to design, implement, and maintain. The congregational planning process should be flexible, adaptable, and designed to meet the hazards your congregation could face. Using the six-step planning process outlined in FEMA’s Guide for Developing High-Quality Emergency Operations Plans for Houses of Worship, your congregation can create a comprehensive plan to meet any disaster you may encounter.
The Planning Process
Step 1: Form a Collaborative Planning Team
In Step 1, a congregation should create a core team to ensure it is ready to respond to threats, hazards, and disaster impacts. The core team should be small enough to permit close collaboration and large enough to include community stakeholders. Look around your congregation for people with the skills and an understanding of how the church functions as well as an understanding of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Members might consist of a nurse, firefighter, police officer, member of the property committee, someone involved in church finances, and those engaged in children’s ministry. Once the team is formed, roles and responsibilities should be assigned, along with establishing a regular meeting schedule until the plan is complete. Many of our WELS congregations are small or located in rural areas, with members spread out over many miles and communities, while others are large and in large urban areas or cities. This may help when determining roles and responsibilities.
Step 2: Understand the Situation
This step allows the team to identify possible threats and hazards confronting the congregation and look at vulnerabilities from those threats and hazards to understand the threats facing their congregations and their surrounding communities. Upon identifying and prioritizing threats and hazards, it is time to look at the risks and the probability that they could occur, impacting their congregation’s ability to worship and carry out other ministry activities.
Step 3: Determine Goals and Objectives
Once a threat and hazard analysis has been completed, the planning team will decide which threats and hazards to include in the plan. Now it’s time to develop goals and objectives for those hazards, outlining desired outcomes before, during, and after disaster strikes. This is also the stage in planning where you want to identify critical functions like your facility’s evacuation procedures and develop goals and objectives with desired outcomes. While we often spend much of our planning time and efforts on preparedness and response, it is essential to focus on short- and long-term recovery, such as emotional and spiritual care. Crisis intervention and identifying potential new worship locations are all critical areas when determining goals and objectives.
Step 4: Plan Development
In Step 4, it’s critical to develop courses of action to accomplish each identified objective from Step 3 and include how you will respond under specific situations and how each response will be implemented by the congregation and across the life of the disaster. Since disaster can occur anytime, this is an excellent time to consider forming a response team made up of key decision makers such as council members and ministry staff, and those who have knowledge of church-critical areas such as insurance policies, media relations, and community liaisons.
Continuity of Ministry
One of the most critical areas to consider in the planning process is the continuity of ministry and how we can ensure critical ministries and functions will continue in the event of a disaster. Perhaps your pastor has been impacted by the disaster and cannot lead worship. Who will plan and lead worship until a vacancy pastor can be called or your pastor recovers? The church response team must understand the challenges and opportunities to its ministries and ensure that adequate measures and resources are available to support both. Consider what the challenges would be if a disaster should affect your pastor. Who would lead worship, or how would you request support from the synod or a sister congregation? Would your education programs continue without interruption or shut down indefinitely for lack of a plan?
Step 5: Plan, Preparation, Review, and Approval
A church plan should be easy to understand and implement while supporting local and state emergency operations plans. Achieving this outcome requires the use of plain language and visual cues tailored to meet your church’s needs. All formats should include a basic plan, functional annexes, and hazard-specific annexes to ensure all goals and objectives have been addressed. At this point, the planning team should develop a draft plan, present it to the congregation for approval, and discuss its implementation.
Step 6: Plan Implementation and Maintenance
Everyone in your congregation will be involved in the plan, one way or another, based on the level of responsibility outlined in the plan’s requirements. Plans require both implementation and maintenance. An initial meeting should be held to outline roles and responsibilities across the congregation, and at a minimum, additional meetings should be held once a year to ensure the plan is still current, to update and post signs, brief new members, inform community stakeholders, and provide copies of the plan as needed. Other critical times to consider when maintaining and updating your plan are during post-disaster after-action reviews, when guidance and standards change, when hazards change, and when new threats are identified.
Training and Exercises
Your church emergency plan should also include a training and exercise program. The training program should consist of training on the plan itself and the equipment, tools, and resources the church will use during its implementation. A good exercise program includes key church personnel, emergency management officials, local responders, and other community stakeholders. Exercise formats include tabletop exercises, drills, and functional and full-scale exercises, all of which should be conducted at the church’s facilities, considering the costs and benefits of a particular exercise.
Conclusion
During times of disaster our communities and congregations come together, and our churches become areas of refuge where WELS members and the community, in general, will go to seek food and shelter and spiritual guidance. This will happen whether we are ready or not. Congregations are not alone and can reach out to WELS Christian Aid and Relief for assistance and resources. As congregations, being prepared will allow us to maintain and continue our ministries to assist those in need in our church and our communities, sharing the gospel with all those in need.
