I Reviewed a Joint FBI/DHS Threat Report: America's 250th Is a Target

With churches planning outdoor celebrations for the 250th birthday of our nation, we am extending the Church Security Threat Level at HIGH (Orange) through July 31.

Jun 15, 2026

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Fireworks and improvised explosives are the most underappreciated threat to churches this July, both as attack weapons and as panic triggers, and the federal government is concerned enough about the period surrounding America’s 250th anniversary that it produced a joint threat assessment covering the entire celebration window. Based on what I learned from that assessment and the open source record behind it, I am extending the Church Security Threat Level System at HIGH (Orange) through July 31, 2026. If your church is planning an outdoor celebration for the birth of our nation, this brief is about your event.

Key Judgments

Highly Likely: The legal availability of consumer fireworks in July, combined with the established pattern of IED use by recent attackers, raises the risk of explosive and incendiary tactics against crowded gatherings through the end of the month.
Highly Likely: Lone offenders and small cells remain the most significant threat to churches, using simple combinations of vehicles, firearms, and improvised devices, and avoiding detection until they act.
Likely: A fireworks-induced panic event will occur at a crowded July gathering somewhere in the country, and churches running outdoor celebrations should plan for crowd reaction to fireworks mistaken for gunfire.
Likely: Iran-linked grievances and foreign terrorist organization messaging will continue to drive attack planning against Jewish institutions and Western religious targets through the summer.
Likely: Law enforcement in regions hosting 250th anniversary and World Cup events will be stretched thin through mid-July, leaving churches in those areas with longer response times than normal.
Possible: A hoax threat or swatting call will target a church or Christian event during the July window, forcing an evacuation decision on a team that has never rehearsed one.

Where This Information Comes From

Before I get into the assessment, I want to be straight with you about sourcing, because if you take this to your pastor or your board, you need to be able to justify it. I was able to review a joint threat assessment prepared by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for law enforcement agencies and other government entities. These assessments are authorized for sharing with private sector security partners, which is how material like this reaches the people responsible for protecting churches. I am not going to quote the document or reproduce it. What I will do is tell you what I learned from it, combine that with open source reporting you can verify yourself, and give you my own assessment of what it means for your team.

The short version is this. The federal government produced a consolidated threat assessment covering the celebrations surrounding the 250th anniversary of American independence, spanning six major cities and a window running from mid-June through mid-July. No specific or credible threat to any event has been identified. Do not take comfort in that. Nearly every church attack we have studied together happened with no specific or credible warning beforehand. What the assessment does establish is a pattern of tactics, recent cases, and converging pressures that every church security team should understand before their congregation gathers on a lawn to celebrate the birth of our nation.

The Synagogue Attack Is the Template You Should Be Studying

In March of this year, a Hezbollah-inspired attacker drove his car into a synagogue, opened fire on the security guards, and then caused an explosion using fireworks, killing himself in the process. No worshippers were killed. The security team absorbed that attack.

I want you to sit with the structure of that incident, because it is the clearest recent example of something I have been teaching for a while now. The vehicle was not the attack. The vehicle was the opening move. The gunfire that followed was aimed at the people whose job it was to respond, and the explosion came after that. Three phases, each one designed to defeat the reaction to the one before it. And notice the third weapon: not military explosives, not a pipe bomb built from scratch, but fireworks, purchased legally and available in July on every corner in most of this country.

Federal analysts have been warning since the New Orleans Bourbon Street attack on New Year’s Day 2025 that vehicle ramming is now routinely paired with follow-on weapons. The New Orleans attacker came out of the truck shooting and had IEDs staged in the area. The March synagogue attacker followed the same progression. If your team’s vehicle plan ends with “the car stopped,” your plan is one phase deep against a three-phase problem. Your perimeter people need to understand that a vehicle strike is their cue to go to work, not the end of the event.

The IED Case Record From the Past Year

Look at what has come through the courts and the arrest reports in just the past twelve months. In March, two ISIS supporters attempted to detonate two improvised explosive devices among a crowd outside the residence of the mayor of New York City, with the stated goal of inflicting casualties surpassing the Boston Marathon bombing. A notebook recovered from their vehicle listed alternate targets, including festivals, parades, and celebrations. In October 2025, a man was arrested on the steps of a Washington DC cathedral ahead of a religious ceremony attended by Supreme Court justices; inside his tent, law enforcement found more than 200 improvised explosive devices and a grievance document. In December 2025, four men were arrested for plotting IED attacks against five locations in Southern California during a public New Year’s Eve event. In July 2025, Texas police arrested a minor who had repeatedly driven a July 4th parade route with chemicals, explosive devices, multiple firearms, and several hundred rounds of ammunition in his possession.

Festivals, parades, celebrations, and religious ceremonies show up in case after case, and that target set describes exactly what churches across America will be running through July. The 250th anniversary adds a layer of symbolism that this kind of attacker actively seeks. Your church picnic with a flag ceremony and a worship set on the back lawn is, from a targeting standpoint, a patriotic mass gathering with no fence and no screening.

Fireworks Panic at Crowded Events

There is a second fireworks problem, and most teams have never thought about it. On July 4, 2019, Chicago police responded to reports of an active shooter at Navy Pier during the fireworks display. There was no shooter. Someone lit a chain of firecrackers, and the resulting stampede trampled and injured more than a dozen people. In July 2025 in Ohio, roughly 400 juveniles set off their own fireworks at a public Independence Day event, police received calls reporting gunshots, and the crowd panicked and fled the scene.

If your church runs an outdoor celebration this July, the most likely emergency you will face is not an attacker. It is a crowd that believes it is under attack. A string of firecrackers fifty yards from your bounce house will produce a full stampede response from parents who have spent years reading about church shootings, and people get hurt in that crush whether or not a single shot was fired. Your team has to be able to do two things at once: rapidly assess whether the sound was gunfire, and manage the crowd movement that has already started while you assess. Those are different skills, and the second one almost never gets drilled.

The flip side is the diversion problem. An attacker who understands crowd behavior can use fireworks to push a crowd in a chosen direction or to mask his approach. The thwarted 2017 Pier 39 plot in San Francisco was built on exactly this logic: the attacker planned to use explosions to funnel fleeing crowds into a kill zone. Pay attention to anyone bringing or staging fireworks on or near your property during events, and make sure your greeters and parking team know it is worth a radio call.

Hoax Threats Will Force Real Decisions

One regional fusion center processed 73 suspicious activity reports involving hoax bomb threats in 2025 alone. In August 2025, 21 American colleges received false active shooter reports over an eight-day period, triggering lockdowns and injuries among people fleeing. In March of this year, a hoax call reporting a mass shooting at a major California theme park drew a heavy police response.

A hoax threat against your church is not harmless. It forces your team to make a real decision with incomplete information in front of a full sanctuary. Evacuating a thousand people into a parking lot creates exactly the kind of exposed crowd an attacker wants, and there are documented cases of threats called in specifically to push people outside. Holding in place and searching requires a plan and people who know what they are looking for. Every team reading this should be able to answer one question before July 4th: who on your team has the authority to order an evacuation, and what is the threshold? If the answer is “we’d figure it out,” you have homework before your celebration, not after.

Host Cities, Stretched Cops, and the Church Next Door

The events driving this federal concern are concentrated in six cities: Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and San Francisco. The New York region alone expects roughly 8 million spectators. Philadelphia is running World Cup matches and anniversary events simultaneously, including a World Cup match on July 4th itself, plus a citywide program supporting 250 block parties. Washington DC is hosting the marquee national celebration on the Mall.

If your church is in or near one of these metro areas, understand what that means operationally. Every available officer, bomb tech, and tactical team in your region will be committed to event security during the peak windows. The deputy who normally rolls past your property on Sunday morning may be posted to a fireworks perimeter forty minutes away, and mutual aid will be tapped out. Your response time assumptions get worse from mid-June through mid-July. Don’t let that scare you. Plan around it. Churches in these regions should assume reduced law enforcement availability and adjust: more eyes on the parking lot, tighter access control, and a medical capability that does not depend on a fast ambulance. And the concern does not stop at the city limits, because summer programming season puts large outdoor gatherings on church calendars everywhere in the country at exactly the time the national picture is elevated.

Threat Indicators

Watch for and report the following through your local law enforcement, the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI, and the CWT SAR platform:

Send us a SAR

Unusual interest in your service times, security procedures, entry points, or camera placement from anyone without a reasonable explanation
Vehicles parked near your property for extended periods, overloaded vehicles, or vehicles with unusual odors or visible leaks near event areas
Fireworks brought onto, staged near, or repeatedly set off around your property during events
Drone activity over your property or events, particularly repeated flights or operators who cannot explain themselves
Anyone photographing or sketching your security features rather than your architecture
Unattended bags, coolers, or strollers left in or near gathering areas
Threats of any kind, called in, posted online, or relayed secondhand, all of which get reported even when they look fake

Threat Assessment

The Church Security Threat Level remains HIGH (ORANGE) and is extended through July 31, 2026. It is highly likely that the period from now through the end of July has more threat streams stacked on top of each other than at any point this year: foreign terrorist organization messaging calling for attacks on Western gatherings, active Iran-linked plotting against religious institutions, a steady run of IED and fireworks cases over the past twelve months, the symbolic weight of the 250th anniversary, World Cup crowds, and the summer months when mass shootings historically peak. All of it lands during the weeks when churches run their largest and most exposed programming of the year.

The primary concern for church security teams remains the lone offender, likely using a vehicle, firearm, or improvised device, possibly in combination, against a soft target with symbolic or religious significance. It is likely that Jewish institutions are the most likely first target, and teams should remember that attackers who set out against one religious target have shown willingness to substitute another when their first choice hardens. The second concern is everything short of a deliberate attack. Fireworks panic at your outdoor event. A hoax threat that forces an evacuation decision. Police tied up across town when you need them. Nobody is running a campaign against churches specifically, and it is possible but less likely that a church will be the first-choice target of an organized plot during this window. The spillover is the problem, and the spillover is enough to justify this extension.

I am extending to July 31 rather than matching the federal window for three reasons. Attackers driven by symbolic dates have historically acted in the weeks around those dates, not just on them. Summer church programming, including VBS weeks, youth conferences, and outdoor services, keeps large, soft, predictable gatherings on the calendar through the end of the month. And dropping a threat level only to raise it again two weeks later trains your team to ignore the system. On August 1, I will reassess. If the environment cools, we step down to ELEVATED (Yellow) and I will tell you why. If it does not, I will tell you that too.

Teams should hold the Orange posture they have been running since early June: full staffing for services and events, exterior overwatch during gatherings, and barriers or vehicles blocking the spots where people bunch up, along with a briefed plan for both hoax threats and fireworks panic. Stay steady and don’t let your team get spun up. Your congregation shouldn’t notice anything different. Your team will.

Biblical Lens

I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint. — Habakkuk 2:1 (ESV)

Habakkuk took his post during a season of national upheaval, when violence was on the horizon and the timeline was uncertain. He did not abandon the watch because the threat had not yet arrived, and he did not leave the tower because the waiting got long. Extending this threat level through July 31 is the same discipline. The watchman stays at his post for the full watch, not just the exciting part of it.

A Final Word

Our nation turns 250 years old this July, and churches across America will gather outside to thank God for it. That is exactly as it should be. The point of everything above is not to cancel the picnic. It is to make sure the team standing post at that picnic understands the environment they are standing in. If this brief helped you see it more clearly, leave a comment and tell me how your church is posturing for the July window. Then forward it to your pastor or your team leader, and have this conversation with your team before July, not after something happens.

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