We Tracked Church Violence for a Full Year. Here's What 196 Incidents Taught Us.

Apr 01, 2026

The full report is available as a PDF at the bottom of this article.

Every week I publish a crime bulletin. I source the incidents, read the police reports, track the court filings, and write it up so your security team has current intelligence. What I had not done until now was step back and look at the full year together.

I spent time this week compiling every incident documented across the 2025 bulletins into a single statistical report. Not every bulletin from the year made it into the analysis — some weeks the demands of field training kept me from publishing — but 32 bulletins were fully reviewed and logged. What came out of that process is documented below, and I want to be straight with you about what it means.

The numbers above are not projections. They are confirmed, sourced incidents pulled directly from law enforcement reports and news coverage documented in real time throughout 2025. The actual annual totals are almost certainly higher, because not every week was captured and because most church-related crime never makes the news at all.

Take a moment with those numbers before reading further. Thirty-six confirmed homicides at or adjacent to church property in a single year. One hundred forty confirmed sex crime incidents. Sixty-two of those committed directly by clergy and pastoral staff. Fourteen cases where a church knew about abuse and buried it rather than reporting it.

That is the state of the threat environment your security team is operating in.

The Finding That Should Change Everything About Your Training Calendar

I have been saying this in the bulletins for years. The 2025 data now proves it statistically.

Sex crimes committed by clergy, staff, and volunteers outnumbered active shooter events by more than 15 to 1. For every active shooter incident documented in 2025, there were more than 15 confirmed cases of sexual abuse or exploitation of a child in a church setting.

I am not telling you to stop training for active shooters. That training saves lives. The Wayne, Michigan incident in June proved that when a congregation member stopped an armed attacker in tactical gear before he could reach the sanctuary.

What I am telling you is that if your entire training budget goes toward tactical response and you have no written child protection policy, no two-adult rule, and no mandatory reporting training for your staff, your priorities are backwards. The data does not argue with me on this. Neither does Scripture.

Matthew 18:6
but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Where the Violence Actually Happens

The other finding that every security team needs to hear: more than 70 percent of the violent incidents documented in 2025 occurred outside the building, in parking lots and on church grounds, not inside the sanctuary during services.

People fleeing dangerous situations instinctively run toward a church. They know it is a place of safety, or they hope it is. They are right to hope that. But when they arrive, they bring whatever they are running from. That has shown up in the data every single week of the year. Shootings, stabbings, homicides — they happen in your parking lot at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday. They happen in your parking lot at 4 in the afternoon on a Sunday when someone follows a funeral attendee out to his car.

If your entire security team is stationed inside the sanctuary, your most dangerous zone has nobody watching it.

The Parking Lot Is Your First Line of Defense

Eleven documented vehicle attacks or intentional rammings of church property occurred in 2025. One woman in Texas circled the building, threw paintings out her window including an image of Christ, and then drove straight through the front entrance. A man in San Antonio drove through the front doors of a megachurch during a mental health crisis. A vehicle crashed through the nursery wall of a California church on a Sunday morning. No one was killed in that last one. The nursery happened to be empty.

If you have children’s ministry classrooms that face a parking lot with no physical barrier between the glass and the vehicles, that is not a minor concern. It is an emergency waiting to happen. Bollards are not expensive relative to what they protect. The argument that they make your church look uninviting is over. The data ended that argument.

Sex Crimes: The Full Picture

Sixty-two clergy and pastoral staff offenses. Forty-three staff and volunteer offenses. Eight cases of child pornography found on church devices or in church-affiliated accounts. Fourteen cases where leadership knew and said nothing.

The offender profile is consistent across every case in this dataset. Predators seek out ministry roles deliberately. They know churches have children. They know Christians are trusting. They know many congregations would rather handle something quietly than call the police and risk embarrassment. That reputation is what makes the church a target for these people.

The solution is not suspicion of everyone. The solution is policy. A real policy. Not a paragraph in a handbook that no one has read since 2018. A living policy that every staff member and volunteer is trained on, that includes a strict two-adult rule with no exceptions for anyone including the pastor, that requires background checks comprehensive enough to include references and prior ministry contacts, and that makes mandatory reporting not a suggestion but a requirement with consequences for non-compliance.

Ephesians 5:11. Have nothing to do with the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

That is not optional. It is the command.

Terror: Closer Than Most Churches Think

Fifteen confirmed terror-related incidents targeting churches or religious gatherings were documented in 2025 in the United States alone. A convicted ISIS supporter who had already planted fake bombs in four churches across three states was sentenced this year. A 17-year-old in South Carolina was arrested for an ISIS-linked bomb plot. A Texas man was communicating plans to attack Christian targets through a gaming platform. Multiple church-specific threats were filed by radicalized individuals identified through FBI and JTTF investigations.

ISIS and Al-Qaeda propaganda explicitly named churches and synagogues as targets in multiple publication cycles throughout 2025. This is not distant. The individuals connected to these plots were in American cities and suburbs. The threat is real, it is current, and it is specifically directed at people who gather in buildings like yours on Sunday mornings.

What the Data Demands

The churches that stopped attacks in 2025 had one thing in common. They had trained personnel who saw the threat early, communicated it quickly, and acted. The Wayne, Michigan security team. The Naples, Florida staff who shielded children and called law enforcement before a single shot was fired. The Louisiana sound booth operator who noticed an armed man climbing toward a media platform during a Sunday service and alerted security before anyone was hurt.

Preparation saved lives in every one of those incidents.

The churches that experienced the worst outcomes had no plan, no trained team, and no coverage where it mattered.

The full 2025 Annual Church Crime Statistical Report, including complete category breakdowns, operational lessons, and immediate action recommendations, is available as a downloadable PDF above.

Every paid subscription goes directly toward keeping this training free for the churches that need it but cannot afford it. The security team at a 75-person congregation in rural Georgia that has never had a budget for professional training gets this bulletin for free because you support it. That is the mission.

The watchman who sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet — his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand. Ezekiel 33:6

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