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A Kill List Targeted Churches. Here’s How We Stopped It.
On July 10th, 2025, a 277 page email landed in hundreds of inboxes across the Treasure Valley of Idaho and across the country.
It named police officers.
It named judges.
It named church members.
It listed home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, children, and workplaces. Then, in plain English, it told people to “go hunt and kill.”
My church was not named in the original document, but we became involved soon after. Friends of mine were named. People I do life with on Sundays were named. Churches in our area were named. The threat was real, and the response had to be immediate.
What happened over the next 48 hours is the reason no one in this story was murdered.
That did not happen because we got lucky. It happened because churches in our area had already built the relationships, the intelligence network, and the law enforcement connections needed to respond before the threat reached our doors.
What Happened
The couple behind the email was Jonathan and Jolene Harms of Boise, Idaho. They had previously been members of Table Rock Church in Boise and had been excommunicated. They were angry about it, and they believed they had a divine commission to bring judgment against the people who had removed them.
On July 10th, they put that belief into a 277 page manifesto and emailed it to hundreds of people. The document named more than 20 victims by name, home address, phone number, and email address. It named their children. It named their workplaces. It named churches.
The document specifically condemned several churches, including Table Rock Church in Boise, Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Faith Community Church in Boise, The Well Reformed Church, and Main Street Church in Boise.
My church was not on that original list. That changed later when intelligence developed that Harms associates were being directed toward additional churches, including ours.
By the time that happened, the system was already moving.
The Police Response
The Harms had already been on law enforcement’s radar before the July 10th email. Jonathan Harms had been placed on a brief mental hold in May, and two church leaders had already obtained civil protection orders against the couple.
The July 10th email violated those orders directly.
Boise Police Department moved quickly. On July 12th, two days after the email went out, Boise PD served arrest and search warrants at the Harms residence on East Highland Valley Drive. Officers knew the couple had weapons, so they staged the crisis negotiation team and the special operations group.
Jonathan Harms came out of the house and complied. He was taken into custody without incident. Inside the home, officers recovered a substantial amount of firearms and ammunition.
Jolene Harms was arrested separately by Garden City Police Department on a related telecommunication harassment charge after sending a message threatening a Boise police officer’s children.
That should have ended the threat.
It did not.
Jolene was released on bond, and over the following weeks both Harmses kept going. They sent certified letters to victims in violation of protection orders. They continued posting the manifesto online. They added new threats. The escalation continued.
In September, both were arrested again on expanded charges. Their bonds were set at $15 million each. As a retired police officer, I can tell you that a $15 million bond for a threat case is something I have never seen before.
They later represented themselves at trial. After two weeks of proceedings, the jury deliberated for about five and a half hours. Jonathan Harms was convicted on 62 counts. Jolene Harms was convicted on 60 counts. The charges included first degree stalking and witness intimidation.
Each now faces more than 200 years in prison.
That is the public record side of the case.
Now let me explain what happened on the church side.
The Church Intelligence Group
Within minutes of the July 10th email landing in inboxes, the document was in the hands of the Treasure Valley Church Security Intelligence Group.
For the last several years, a number of churches in the Boise area have been meeting regularly to coordinate on security. We call it our intelligence group.
The men who serve as intelligence officers at each church know each other. We have each other’s phone numbers. We have each other’s email addresses. We have a standing agreement.
If a threat lands at your church, you push it out to the group.
If a threat lands in the group, every church gets it.
That is why the response moved so quickly. When the manifesto hit one church inbox, the intelligence officers did not have to figure out who to call. They already knew. Within minutes, every intelligence officer in the network had a copy.
We worked the document together.
We pulled out names.
We pulled out addresses.
We cross referenced the named victims with church membership rolls.
We identified threat indicators inside the manifesto.
Then we built an intelligence bulletin and pushed it to area church security teams immediately.
The church security response happened independently of the police investigation, but it was informed by the same urgency: protect the people who had been named, assess whether our churches were exposed, and harden our defenses before anyone showed up. We were not interfering with law enforcement. We were not duplicating their job. We were doing the work churches need to do to protect their own people, assess the threat, identify who may be affected, and harden their defenses.
The reason we were able to move that fast is simple.
The relationships already existed.
There was no learning curve in the middle of the crisis. The system was already running before the threat arrived.
The Trespass Order
The Harms going to jail did not end the threat.
Jolene was out on bond. The manifesto was still circulating online. Their associates, whom they referred to as disciples, were still active.
Then word came to my church through a reliable source that those associates were being directed to our services.
We were not in the original manifesto. We had not done anything to the Harmses. But we were part of the intelligence group, and now we were on the list of places where bad things could happen.
We did not wait.
Our church secured a trespass order against Jolene Harms. The sheriff’s department delivered it, and she was barred from all church property.
A few days later, Jolene called the church to ask why. She got a direct answer.
We knew what was happening, and she was not welcome at our church.
The phone call ended.
No associates ever showed up.
Whatever they had planned never came through our doors because we acted before they arrived.
A trespass order does two things.
The first is obvious. It legally bars a known threat from coming onto your property. If that person comes back, they can be arrested. Your team does not need to debate it at the door. You do not need to improvise. The law has already been put in motion.
The second thing is less obvious, but it is just as important. A trespass order tells the threat actor and anyone working with them that your church is awake, organized, and willing to use the legal tools available to protect your congregation.
Bad actors looking at a church as a soft target are looking for confusion. They are looking for hesitation. They are looking for a congregation that will not act.
A trespass order sends a different message.
Not here.
Lessons for Your Church
There are five practical lessons every church security team should take from this case.
1. Build a Regional Church Security Intelligence Group Before You Need One
Do not wait until a manifesto lands in your inbox to figure out which churches near you have security teams.
Find the churches in your area. Reach out to the men responsible for security. Start a meeting. Once a month is enough to begin.
Talk about what you are seeing. Talk about people moving between churches who concern you. Talk about protocols. Talk about weak points. Build trust over time.
When a real threat arrives, the call needs to go out immediately. That only happens if the relationships already exist.
2. Your Church Needs an Intelligence Officer
The intelligence officer position at your church is not optional.
This is not a volunteer who checks the news on Sunday morning. This needs to be a man assigned to the role, with the time and tools to do the job.
His responsibilities should include monitoring open source threats, watching social media accounts of known persons of concern, maintaining a working relationship with local law enforcement, and pushing alerts to your team and to peer churches in your area.
There is another piece to this.
When another church’s intelligence officer calls you, answer the phone.
Over the years, I have personally called churches that were named in threats to warn them, and those calls have gone unanswered. That is a failure on the receiving end.
If you are the man at your church who would receive that kind of call, decide now that you will answer it.
3. Build Direct Relationships With Law Enforcement
The reason we were able to get fast, candid communication from officers about the Harms case is that those relationships had been built long before July 10th.
Take a patrol officer to coffee.
Invite officers to your security team meetings.
Walk them through your church layout.
Give them your contact information and ask for theirs.
Your first real conversation with local law enforcement should not happen during a crisis.
4. Ask Law Enforcement to Create a Church and Synagogue Liaison Position
Every police department and sheriff’s office in this country should have an officer assigned as a liaison to churches and synagogues in their jurisdiction.
This does not need to be complicated. It can be an additional duty.
There is likely a Christian officer in nearly every department who would gladly take this responsibility. The agency loses nothing. Churches gain a direct conduit into the department.
If you are a chief of police or sheriff reading this, designate that officer. Have him meet with church security leaders quarterly. The return on investment is a network of trained eyes across your city.
5. Use the Civil Legal Tools Available to You
Churches need to be proactive when credible threats develop.
A trespass order is one of the cleanest tools available. Most jurisdictions allow a property owner, including a church, to issue a trespass notice through law enforcement. Once that order is in place, a violation becomes a criminal offense.
Know how this process works in your county before you need it.
Know who handles it.
Have your church’s authority to issue trespass notices documented in writing.
When the time comes, you should be able to act the same day.
What the Bible Says
There is also a theological question here, and churches need to answer it from Scripture rather than emotion.
Some Christians will hear about a trespass order and wonder whether a church should ever bar someone from the property. They may ask whether it is right to use civil authority against an individual.
The answer is yes.
Ecclesiastes 4:9 through 12 says:
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow... And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him, a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
That is exactly what a church security intelligence group is meant to do.
A single watchman at a single church can be overwhelmed. A network of watchmen across multiple churches, working in coordination with law enforcement, becomes a threefold cord.
The Harms could threaten one church. They could not outrun a network of churches and a police department that already knew how to work together.
First Corinthians 12:24 through 26 says:
“But God has so composed the body... that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together.”
When one church in our region came under threat, the rest of the churches did not say, “That is their problem.”
We worked the document.
We pushed the alert.
We prayed.
We protected one another.
That is how the body of Christ should function.
The harder passage, and the one that speaks directly to the trespass order issue, is Nehemiah 13:7 through 9. Nehemiah discovered that Tobiah had been given a chamber in the courts of the house of God. Scripture says Nehemiah became angry, threw Tobiah’s household furniture out of the chamber, ordered the rooms cleansed, and restored them to their proper use.
Nehemiah did not negotiate with Tobiah. He did not leave the threat in place because removing him felt uncomfortable. He used the authority God had placed in his hands to remove an enemy presence from the place where God’s people gathered.
That is the biblical principle behind a trespass order.
When a church identifies a credible threat and uses lawful civil tools to keep that threat off church property, it is not being unloving. It is not being unchristian. It is protecting the congregation God has placed under its care.
The Bible does not require God’s people to leave the door open to those who mean them harm.
The System Worked Because It Was Already Built
This case did not end in tragedy because a system was already in place when the threat arrived.
The Treasure Valley Church Security Intelligence Group existed before July 10th.
The relationships with Boise Police Department existed before July 10th.
The intelligence officers at the affected churches knew their job before July 10th.
Boise PD had been watching the Harms long enough to know what they were dealing with.
When the threat continued after the arrests, individual churches took proactive defensive action and used the civil legal tools available to them.
None of that happened by accident.
It was paid for in months of meetings, phone calls, coffee with officers, and the discipline of intelligence officers building their networks one contact at a time.
A lot of that work does not look like security work when you are doing it. It looks like fellowship. It looks like coordination. It looks like another meeting on the calendar.
But on July 10th, that work was the difference between a kill list distributed into a vacuum and a kill list distributed into a system that closed in around the people responsible inside 48 hours.
What Your Church Should Do This Week
If your church does not have an intelligence officer, fill that position this week.
If your region does not have a church security intelligence group, start one.
If your relationship with local law enforcement is limited to traffic stops, fix that this month.
If you have credible intelligence on a named threat coming toward your church, do not wait. Use the sheriff. Use the trespass order. Use the civil tools God has placed in your hands for exactly this kind of situation.
The Harms will likely spend the rest of their lives in prison.
The people they targeted are still walking around.
That is the goal of church security.
Keep our people walking around.
Pray for the Harms. Pray that they repent, turn to Christ, and submit themselves to the Word of God. Then get back to work protecting the congregation God has placed in front of you.
If this article was useful, send it to your pastor, your security team leader, and the man at the next church over you have been meaning to call.
Then leave a comment and tell me what your church has done to build relationships with other congregations and local law enforcement.
