What I'm Building: The Safer Church

I’ve been quiet about this one for a while. Time to fix that.

For the past couple of years I’ve led the volunteer safety team at my church — 46 people who show up early, stay late, and stand post so that everyone else can worship without a second thought. Great people. Genuinely committed people.

And here’s what I learned watching them, and teams like them, up close: volunteer safety teams don’t fail from lack of effort. They fail from lack of operational discipline.

Who’s covering the east door for second service? Where’s the write-up from that incident in the parking lot last month? Who actually got trained on the radio protocol, and who just nodded?

The answers exist. They live in a group text from three weeks ago, a spreadsheet with two owners and no truth, a paper sign-up sheet in a drawer, and the head of one guy named Dave who is — bless him — on vacation.

That’s not a Dave problem. That’s a scaffolding problem.

So I’m building the scaffolding

The Safer Church is software purpose-built for church safety teams: scheduling volunteers against real services and events, coordinated communication when something’s actually happening, and institutional memory for incidents — so what the team learned in March is still known in November, whether or not Dave’s back from the lake.

It’s not a panic button, and it’s not another church management system. It’s the operational layer for the people who stand at the doors: who’s on, what’s happening, what happened before.

I’m dogfooding it with my own team, every single Sunday. There is no sharper product review on earth than a volunteer with a radio in one hand telling you your scheduling screen is wrong. We’re onboarding a few more churches this summer, with self-service launch planned for this fall.

Why this, why me

I’ve spent decades in software, most of it in security — protecting people who will never know my name from very bad people trying to do very bad things. I’ve found that the work only ever made sense to me one way: security isn’t a compliance exercise. It’s protection. Of actual humans.

This is that same conviction, pointed at the community I love most. Hostility toward people of faith isn’t shrinking; anyone paying attention can see that. The 300,000+ churches in this country running safety ministries on group texts and tribal knowledge deserve better tooling than a spreadsheet named FINAL_schedule_v3(2).xlsx.

Is this a business? Yes — on purpose. I’m building it solo and self-funded, no venture capital, because I’ve watched what outside money does to a mission when the mission stops being convenient. I think of it as business as mission: commercial structure, ministry intent. The structure keeps it alive; the intent keeps it honest.

What’s next

More building. More Sundays. More churches.

If you serve on a church safety team — or you lead one, or you’ve been voluntold onto one — I’d genuinely love to hear what your team’s Sunday morning actually looks like. The messy version. That’s the version I’m building for.

You can find it at thesaferchurch.com.

For the people at the doors: I see you. This one’s for you.