Churches these days have been adopting a new practice:  Employing, either for pay or volunteer, security people for a variety of reasons.  One of the churches I go to meets in a hotel, so their security people are mostly there to make sure the hotel guests don't steal any kids from the nursery.  It makes some sense, and it's less about physical enforcement and more about just being aware. 

But their other role, as I just learned from one of them last night, is literally to protect the pastors.  This is weird.  The reason is because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if a crazy person has something against a particular church, they're likely to go directly for the pastor.  This probably has at least something to do with the fact that this church meets in a hotel.  But it's also because of the recent church shootings in Colorado, where a guy went into two churches and just starting shooting people, finally being brought down by none other than a volunteer church security person with a gun. 

The security people at my church don't carry guns, but they do wear ear pieces like they're in the Secret Service.  And while all the other church volunteers wear happy blue t-shirts, the security people wear black ones.  My security friend said he probably wouldn't be willing to take a bullet for one of the pastors (at least he's honest), but any confrontation would probably be squelched pretty quickly by the presence of several men in black shirts wearing ear pieces. 

One of my new favorite websites, Stuff Christians Like, recently wrote about this.