By Marv Knox
What would happen at your church if someone suffered a heart attack during a worship service? Or if parents reported their child had been abused sexually by a youth mi
nistry volunteer? Or if a tornado struck? Or if someone left a threatening message on the pastor’s voicemail?
Designated members of your congregation should not only know what to do in crisis situations, they also should rehearse how to handle them, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Jay Kieve advised.
Kieve is the Fellowship’s director for leadership development, abuse prevention and church safety. In addition to taking the lead on preventing and following up on clergy sexual abuse, he heads up a relatively new CBF ministry focused on church safety and crisis prevention. It’s designed to help congregations both avoid and respond to a broad array of potential dangers.
“We want churches to understand they don’t have to figure this out on their own,” Kieve said. “Pastors already have to know too much about too many things. So, they don’t have to solve crisis and security problems by themselves. We’re here to help.”
CBF initiated its safety and prevention program about three years ago, after a mass shooting at a church-run school made national news, Kieve reported.
A CBF state coordinator called Kieve, looking for guidance in how to help churches become safer spaces. “He asked, ‘What can we tell churches about preventing this kind of violence?’” Kieve recalled. “I think he asked me because I already was talking about preventing the violence of sexual abuse. My response was, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.’”
Kieve’s quest to prevent violence led him to join a couple of associations focused on organizational safety and security: The Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) and ASIS International. ATAP is composed of “pros working across governments and industries to identify and manage people behaving in threatening ways,” he said. ASIS International is the organization that “issues standards for the security industry to guide best practices and certify professionals across a few security disciplines,” he said.
Kieve also connected with Joshua Villines, a graduate of Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, who is an endorsed Baptist police chaplain and is also board certified in behavioral threat assessment.
Villines encouraged Kieve to form and help train a Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management—or BTAM—team “to help pastors navigate threatening behavior with evidence-informed guidance,” Kieve said. CBF’s team includes Kieve as coordinator, as well as a clinical mental health professional, an attorney, a human resources expert and an operations specialist. Villines also consults with the team as needed.
“The BTAM approach uses tools created by psychologists and criminologists to evaluate threatening behavior, identify opportunities to mitigate violence and prepare safety plans for targets of the threat,” Kieve said. “If a pastor or a church experiences threatening behavior that requires evaluation and management, our BTAM team can bring perspective and support for the church.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2026 edition of fellowship! Magazine.