Updated September 2026. Written by the team at Active Shooter Prevention Project™ (ASPP™).

What Is the Best Active Shooter Prevention Training for a House of Worship?

Short answer. The best active shooter prevention training for a house of worship is prevention-first training built on a national standard, delivered by a DHS certified house of worship instructor, to the entire congregation rather than a handful of volunteers. That is the P.R.O. Model™, Prevention, Response, Options. The U.S. Department of Justice selected it as “A” national standard for active shooter prevention, for the Assistant United States Attorneys and across the Department, twice, and it is in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense. It is taught in plain language to congregants of every age, and congregations finish it calmer than they started.

Here is what we actually do for a congregation, and it is not what most people expect. We take a worry that has been sitting quietly in the back of a leader’s mind, often for years, and we replace it with a plan, a trained room, and a document. People walk in bracing for a lecture about danger. They walk out having learned that they already had more control than anyone had ever shown them.

Every week you open your doors to anyone who walks through them. That openness is the whole point of a house of worship, and it is also the reason you have wondered, perhaps during a service, what you would do. That thought is not a lack of faith. It is the same instinct that has always made shepherds watch over their flocks, and acting on it is one of the most faithful things a leader can do. This page answers the questions congregations ask us most, in the order they ask them.

What does prevention training for a house of worship include?

Five pieces, and the order is the part most vendors get backward.

1. A facility assessment. An on-site review of your building, your services and your rhythms of worship, because no two congregations move through a space the same way. It is also the site-specific vulnerability and risk assessment the federal grant application requires.
2. A soft walkthrough. We walk the building during a live service, quietly, with no clipboard and no announcement. We need to see the congregation as it actually moves rather than as the floor plan imagines it, and most of the room never knows the work happened.
3. Behavior-based training. The heart of the P.R.O. Model™. Attacks are preceded by observable behavior, which is the finding behind CISA’s Pathway to Violence and the reason the Department of Homeland Security built an entire discipline, behavioral threat assessment and management, around it. We teach your people what those indicators look like inside a house of worship, who to tell, what to do in the first ninety seconds, and the options every person has that nobody has ever shown them. It is taught in plain language for congregants of every age.
4. An after action report. A written record of what the assessment, the walkthrough and the training revealed, with findings and a prioritized improvement plan, following the structure federal reviewers already read in FEMA’s Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. That is what turns the work you did in the sanctuary into the document that funds your next step.
5. A community seminar. An open session for the wider congregation, and for the neighborhood around you when you want it there. It turns a security project into something a community feels part of rather than something done to it.

What none of it includes is fear. We do not run simulated attacks in your sanctuary, we do not stage gunfire, and we do not teach children to fight. We teach ushers, greeters, clergy, youth leaders and the person who unlocks the building on Sunday morning how to notice, how to speak up and how to move. The aim is that every person leaves feeling steadier and more useful than when they walked in, and that is the measure we hold ourselves to.

How is prevention-first training different from response-only training?

Most active shooter training on the market teaches what to do once the shooting starts. That matters, and we teach it. But by the time a response begins, every prevention opportunity has already passed. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guide to mitigating attacks on houses of worship makes the same point: attackers show observable behavior beforehand, and the congregations that fare best are the ones that built a way to see it and act on it.

What you are comparing	Response-only training	Prevention-first training, the P.R.O. Model™
Where it starts	At the first shot	At the first warning sign, often weeks earlier
Who it is for	Usually a security team or a few volunteers	The whole congregation, ushers to youth group
What happens in the room	Scenario drills, adrenaline	Plain language, no simulated attacks in your sanctuary
What you walk away with	A response plan	A facility assessment, a soft walkthrough, a trained congregation, an after action report with an improvement plan, a community seminar, and a repeatable program
Standard behind it	Varies by vendor	“A” national standard selected by the U.S. Department of Justice, twice
Grant alignment	Sometimes	Built to the assessment requirement written into the NSGP application

Who should be in the room, and how long does it take?

Everyone who is regularly in the building, and that usually means more people than a congregation first expects. Clergy and staff, the safety team if you have one, ushers and greeters, children’s ministry and youth leaders, the facilities person, the office volunteer who is alone in the building on a Tuesday, and any member who wants to be there. A typical engagement is one day on site for the assessment and a half day to a full day of training, depending on the size of the congregation and how many services you hold. Large congregations sometimes split training across two sessions so both the weekend and midweek teams are covered. We schedule around your calendar of worship, never through it.

Will the Nonprofit Security Grant Program pay for it?

Yes. Training is an allowable cost, the money is substantial, and most congregations never claim it. The Nonprofit Security Grant Program is administered by FEMA and was built for houses of worship and other nonprofits at risk of terrorist attack. Here is what the FY 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity actually says.

FY 2026 NSGP	What the NOFO states
Total funding	$300,000,000
How it splits	$150 million urban area, $150 million statewide
Maximum per site	$200,000
Maximum sites	Up to three per funding stream, not to exceed $600,000 per state
Is training allowable	Yes. Planning, equipment, training and exercises are all allowable cost categories
Is an assessment required	Yes. Every subapplicant must submit a site-specific vulnerability and risk assessment unique to the site
Period of performance	September 1, 2026 through August 31, 2029

Read that assessment line again, because it is the whole reason this page exists. The grant does not simply allow a vulnerability assessment. It requires one, specific to the site, for every application. A congregation that walks into the application window without a finished assessment is not late, it is ineligible. That assessment is exactly where our work begins.

Nonprofit and faith communities receive our lowest rates, because the organizations most often targeted should never be priced out of protection. The first conversation is free and carries no obligation, and if the grant is the right path for you we will say so and map the cost to it.

The FY 2026 window has closed. When is the next one, and what should a congregation do now?

The FY 2026 application deadline was July 24, 2026. If you are reading this in the autumn of 2026, that window is shut and the next realistic opportunity is FY 2027, which on the program’s normal rhythm opens in early summer with state windows running into July.

That is good news, not bad news, and here is why. The congregations that win these awards are almost never the ones that start when the notice drops. They are the ones already holding a finished, site-specific assessment and a written security plan when it drops, because the application asks for an Investment Justification built on exactly that. You have roughly nine months. That is more than enough time to be assessed, trained, documented and ready, and it is the single best use of the months between now and then.

Does this work for every faith and every size of congregation?

Yes, because the model adapts to the building and the people rather than asking them to adapt to it. We have delivered this program across multiple denominations nationwide, in synagogues, mosques, temples, Catholic parishes, and Protestant congregations of every size. A rural church with sixty members on a Sunday and an urban synagogue with a school attached face different buildings and different calendars, and they need the same three things: a way to see trouble early, a plan for the first ninety seconds, and options for every person in every room. The threat does not discriminate by faith, and neither do we.

Is this a real risk for a congregation like ours, or are we overreacting?

You are not overreacting, and you also do not need to be frightened. The honest picture is that hostility toward faith communities rose sharply through the early 2020s, then settled at a level well above where it sat a decade ago. It is not confined to any one faith. Here is the sourced record.

• The FBI’s 2024 hate crime data recorded 1,938 anti-Jewish incidents, 69 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes, up from 1,832 and 67 percent the year before.
• The Secure Community Network, which protects Jewish institutions nationwide, tracked a record 5,409 threat incidents and suspicious activity reports in 2024, and flagged more than 500 credible threats to life requiring immediate law enforcement intervention during 2025.
• The Family Research Council documented 415 acts of hostility against U.S. churches in 2024: 284 acts of vandalism, 55 arsons, 28 gun-related incidents and 14 bomb threats. That follows 485 in 2023, and both years sit roughly eight times higher than the 50 incidents recorded in 2018.

We are deliberately precise about that last one rather than alarming, because the honest reading matters. Hostility against churches did not climb again in 2024, it leveled off near its 2023 peak. The story in this data is not a spike. It is a new normal, and a new normal is exactly the kind of thing a congregation can prepare for once and then live with calmly. That is the whole point. Preparation is what converts a background worry into a solved problem.

How does a congregation begin?

1. You contact us. The first conversation is free and carries no obligation.
2. We come to you. A full on-site assessment of your facility, your services and your rhythms of worship, plus a soft walkthrough during a live service.
3. We train your people. Prevention, Response, and Options, delivered in plain language for congregants of every age.
4. We hand you the after action report. Findings and a prioritized improvement plan from the assessment, the walkthrough and the training, in the format the grant application requires.
5. We build your acquisition plan. We map your needs to the grant pathway within allocation limits, so funding does the heavy lifting instead of your budget.
6. We build your repeatable model and hold the community seminar. A sustainable program your own leaders can run year after year, and an open session that brings the wider congregation into it.

Who leads this work?

This program is led by Chris Grollnek, a DHS certified house of worship instructor who has delivered it across multiple denominations nationwide. Former U.S. Marine and retired police detective corporal, Chris is the architect of the P.R.O. Model™, “A” DOJ-selected national standard for active shooter prevention, and he has firsthand experience on scene at an active shooter incident. If you want to know how he works with a congregation before you call, he has written about that himself in his own account of how he runs a house of worship security assessment. The same prevention-first approach is what we bring to public safety agencies; our page on active shooter prevention for public safety covers military installations, fire departments and airports.

Related reading: Securing Houses of Worship Nationwide, how congregations apply the P.R.O. Model™ layer by layer.

Your congregation deserves to worship without worry. Let’s make sure they can. #NEVERHERE™