Understanding the liabilities and implications of bringing firearms into church.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

<p>Understanding the liabilities and implications of bringing firearms into church.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Human Resources

Leander Tomazeli

Church Security Solutions

How many of you know what we do for the church?

We are the insurance company for the church.

So not only from an insurance standpoint, where we cover the liability claims, or the property insurance claims, the auto insurance claims, or maybe you go on a missionary trip, a mission trip, and you want to get short-term travel insurance, you can get it through us on our website.

So we do all the insurance stuff for the church.

And we have, we actually have a video prepared to introduce what we are and what we do for the church.

So we are pretty much the insurance company for the church, right?

And it all started when the church decided to put some funds together.

It was about $25, 000 about 80 years ago, 1936.

And after that, we kept growing, growing, and we now insure over about $16 billion in assets.

So, that's the only reason why we exist is to serve the church.

So we call ourselves, we're titled a captive insurance company, which is an insurance company with a specific purpose just to insure our clients.

So let's say if the Baptist Church wants insurance and they ask me, Leander can you provide me with a quote?

I say nope, sorry, I only work for the church and that's what we do.

So and as a conference you have the option of going outside to get insurance elsewhere but we only exist to really serve the church.

So if all the conferences decide to get insurance elsewhere they can and we would close our business because that's what we do.

And by doing that, we create policies that are customized to better serve the church.

We understand the church like anyone else because we are the church.

And we're going to talk about risk management for churches and schools.

And before I go further, I'm an account executive.

Nancy Sormac is the customer service rep.

How many of you know what a certificate of insurance is?

That's what we do when you need, when you're renting, you want to use the state's gymnasium and they require you to provide a certificate of insurance showing liability insurance so you request that through the conference the conference fills out a form the form gets submitted to Nancy and Nancy issues your certificate of insurance.

We call it COI, certificate of insurance.

So that's our team, that's your team available to you.

If you have questions, if you have trouble, you feel free to call me.

You have my phone number, you have my cell phone.

So, like I said, we don't see ourselves as a business so much.

We only we are here to be a supporting mechanism to the conferences, to the local churches, so that you can do your ministry without any concerns and without having to think too much about insurance.

We want to make sure that you are properly insured so that you can do your ministry freely.

So what you get is a declaration of benefits, like it's a summary of the policy.

The legal authority of all the properties, of all the churches and schools, is the conference.

And then what you get as a church leadership, you get a statement of values which shows your building values, your content values, your square footage, your titles, all of the information that you need to operate.

But when it comes to insurance and the policies, the policy stays in the conference.

Yeah, and the conference can send you a summary of benefits, can send you a lot of information, but that's the way we are structured.

Edie Ellis is your contact person for liability questions, and then Wendy Welch is your person for property related questions.

And then, so Let's say if you have a question about billing, about property insurance billing, you go to Wendy Welch and she can investigate or find out what the situation is for you.

And the process, I just want to reemphasize the process of filing a claim.

Just like you said, you get a form from Michigan Conference, you fill out that form, send it back to Michigan Conference, they submit it to us.

What we do when we get that form, we assign an adjuster.

An adjuster comes out to your property and will look at the damages that were done, let's say by hail.

Once the adjuster sees the damages, that adjuster writes up a report.

That report will give us what we need to process payments.

So that's what we mean by risk financing.

That's the insurance portion of the operation.

We come in and we make payments to make your property whole again.

Now, there are other 2 parts of our ministry which is called risk control and the risk identification.

They kind of go hand in hand because once you identify the risk, you want to control the risk.

You want to create a prevention plan that will allow you to minimize the the potentials of of an accident taking place.

For example, let's see, let's see, let's see, trying to see if there's a risk here.

You go into a church and then you see cords laying on the floor, alright?

Slip strips and falls are the most common claim that we get from across the entire division.

So by just simply removing the cords from that place, you're gonna potentially prevent an injury from taking place.

That's an example of identifying the risk.

You walk into a room and say, okay, this court, someone may trip and fall because of this.

So you find ways as a safety officer or as a safety person or a leader at the church to prevent that or create a prevention plan so that that applies and we're going to give you a lot of a lot of examples later on as to what things that you can do at the church property on-site yes church property on site.

We got a pretty good risk management risk field here right now.

We, yeah, we talked about this last year.

Yeah, now I'm connecting the faces, yeah.

See, that's something else, you're right.

Yeah, that's the kind of mindset we need to have when we go into our churches.

Especially when, if you are an assigned safety officer, that's the mentality that I recommend you having.

You go into a place and see, well, this activity, There's not enough supervisors here.

We have 20 kids running around, just 1 teacher.

So you take that into your leadership and start making recommendations so you can, you know, improve your quality of your church and of your programs.

So that's what the ministry is all about.

So identify, control, creating prevention methods, minimize and avoid risks, and then the risk financing, when you actually have an accident and that risk is transferred over to the insurance company.

So the Risk Management for Safety officers are people who are in charge of helping the churches with safety.

In 2018, the NAD Risk Management Committee voted the 2018 NAD Risk Management Initiatives.

Having a Risk Management Committee at the conference and at the church level.

Risk Management for Schools & Churches

Our gracious Father in heaven, we come before you this afternoon thanking you so much for the many blessings you've given us.

What a beautiful sight here at this camp meeting that you've provided.

We just ask a special blessing on all the seminars that are going on, and especially today as We talk about a topic that many conferences are concerned about, and that's the use of guns.

We just ask for your understanding and love, and thank you for all that you've done for us, amen.

We're here to talk about guns in churches from a liability standpoint, there's a whole nother issue, even though we'll kind of cover it, and sometimes they interact with each other, and that's the moral side of that, or the legal side of that, but I'm really here to give a presentation in regards to the liability aspect of it.

Most of you know, and let me just give a background, if you have a car, you have insurance on that car, right?

If you have a home, you have home insurance on that car, or in that home.

If you own a business, you probably have some general liability coverage with that business in regards to protecting you, the individual, for any general liability claims that may come up, any negligent claims that may come up, or it may even cover maybe a contractual issue that has gone wrong or something.

Well, the church is no different than you as an individual in the sense that the church has insurance.

The church, in its wisdom, back in the 30s developed their own insurance company.

And it's unique within many of the Protestant denominations.

The Catholics and Mormons are a different setup in regards to how they handle their liability claims.

But the Adventist Church has their own insurance company.

And the General Conference set up a separate corporation to manage that insurance company.

That other corporation is Adventist Risk Management, and there are, what, about 140 employees within that company that all they do is manage this insurance company.

I'm in just 1 little section of that company in that I'm 1 of 5, now maybe 6 attorneys that handle liability claims for the Adventist Church.

Whenever there's a claim, just like your automobile, if you're involved in an accident, you notify your insurance company.

Well, they protect you, they may pay damages on your automobile, they may pay for damages if someone was injured in that accident, and the other person may have insurance as well.

So just as an example, if someone here at the camp meeting trips over a sidewalk and maybe the sidewalk was raised a little or should have been fixed or wasn't fixed or something along those lines, and they injure themselves, they could bring a claim against the, within the conference for liability issues, and eventually that would be handled by typically 1 of the attorneys, and we would negotiate some type of resolution to resolve that claim.

Sometimes those claimants will hire their own attorneys.

And we then interact with those attorneys in trying to resolve the claim and try to resolve it prior to any type of lawsuit.

But if there is a lawsuit involved, then we will retain local counsel to manage those claims and eventually again try to resolve those claims either in a mediation or something along those lines.

So do we understand where I'm coming from in regards to this particular topic?

And that is really the liability issues that guns present.

I've got this pillar right here, so I feel kind of like I'm walking around.

But from a liability standpoint, we've all heard in the news that there have been these mass shootings, these shootings that occur, and the churches are not unique in the sense of where those shootings occur.

And I know that I've been advised that there have been some churches that approach the conference and say, look it, we want to consider arming ourselves to protect ourselves, to protect our members in case there happens to be a shooting here at our church.

Well that raises a red flag certainly with the conference when that issue arises And they then get on the phone or contact Leander and say, hey, wait a minute, we've got some churches that are concerned about this.

And Michigan Conference is not unique in that regards.

Other conferences, I've given this topic on several other occasions with other churches who've approached their conferences in that regards.

So again, my topic here is in regards to potentially liability issues with bringing about guns in churches.

But let's just talk about the historical background really.

Well, there were those of founding fathers who didn't feel that the Constitution went far enough.

There were some that didn't feel that we should even have a Constitution.

And so as part of the compromise, we understood that the founding fathers then said, look, we want to have articles, we want to have additions to the Constitution to give people individual rights.

At the time it wasn't really thought of individual rights, but it was thought of state rights.

And so the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are referred to as the Bill of Rights.

By the way, can anybody tell me How many amendments there are currently?

And I can't tell you when the last 1 was, but it's been a while.

To actually get an amendment passed is very difficult within the system, the way the Constitution set that up, to be ratified by all the states.

And so it's basically doesn't occur anymore.

The 14th Amendment is the amendment that actually allows or that the courts use to apply the amendments to personal rights and to state rights.

Well, In regards to the rights of an individual to carry, just to carry a gun, we talk about the Second Amendment.

It says, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." That 1 sentence over the decades has caused considerable debate in regards to what that actually means or how that's interpreted.

I think it was 2007, the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling in District of Columbia v.

Hiller said that that applies to individual rights to cover or to carry guns.

So the Supreme Court has interpreted this, the last interpretation of this amendment is that an individual has a right to carry guns.

No, we know that in every very different jurisdiction.

Some people say, oh, I have a right to carry a gun.

And the answer to that is simply no, that's not accurate.

Most states, most jurisdictions have regulations on how you purchase a gun, what you do with a gun, where you can carry it, where you can't carry it.

So it doesn't ultimately give you an open book just to carry a gun wherever you want.

But it does give an individual right to go down and purchase a gun with whatever parameters there are.

So we're talking about active shootings now, and we talk about the percentage of where do these shootings occur.

Well, this is a study by the FBI, and you can see that it's from 2000 to 2013.

You can see that most of the shootings occur within a business or a school.

What their definition is for a mass shooting, I won't get into it, because there's different definitions on what is a mass shooting.

But the concept is, what we're talking about is someone going in and killing people, killing people for whatever reason.

Most shooters in these situations are males.

We haven't had a female shooter, at least it's not documented at least under these definitions.

Most of the males are 20 to 40 years old.

Most of the shootings occur with an AR-15, an automatic weapon, either modified or bought that way.

And that most of the guns used in these shootings are obtained legally.

This study was actually updated in 2014-2015 and then again by the FBI in 2015-2016, or 16-17, excuse me.

And over that period of time, they added 50 mass shootings within their definition.

And out of those 50, there were only 2 out of those 50 that occurred in a place of worship.

If you're concerned, of those that are concerned about having a shooting at your church, you're more likely to have a shooter come to the conference office or to a school and shoot than you are at a church service themselves.

I know a lot of conferences, simply because of that statistic and because of threats that they've had, have now beefed up their security at a conference office as to who can get in, who can get out.

But statistically, you're more likely to have a mass shooting or some type of shooting at a school or at the conference office.

A school shooting is a whole other ballgame.

That's a whole other topic that we won't even discuss today because that covers other issues that are different than a church setting.

By the way, we have a lot of time and I will entertain and will encourage questions.

Maybe at the end, I'll take the questions, but if you really have an urgency to feel like you wanna ask me something, feel free to raise your hand and ask me something and I'll either defer maybe to the end or I'll try to answer it there.

If you have any questions or any comments, please feel free to give those out.

You know, most shootings also involve domestic issues, or they involve family issues, or employment issues.

When the shooters that actually live through the shooting, they aren't killed or commit suicide and they analyze it, those are the 3 most basic issues that's going on with the shooter.

Most of the shooters, they know the people that they're shooting or interacting with.

Back to Menu

Series

Human Resources

Church Security Solutions

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Human Resources

Risk Management for Schools & Churches

1h 12m

Adventist Risk Management

Adventist Risk Management - Part 3: Insurance 101

45m

Practical

Risk in 2017 & Beyond

1h 14m

Sound Doctrine