Controlling building access is another key element of church safety. It’s important to limit and even track who has entry to which parts of your church building and at what times.
The good news is that changes in recent years have made the process much easier. Security used to be handled by humans responding to push-button audio-only greetings, tracking entrances and exits with paper logs. Now, much more refined and useful options are available. Here are some church safety best practices for controlling access to your church building.
Beginning with RFID
One of the cornerstone elements to new church safety technology is RFID. This acronym stands for radio-frequency identification. With this technology, digital data is programmed into RFID tags that can be scanned by a reader via radio waves. Each unique tag transmits data that can be stored in a database for later retrieval and reporting. Also, unlike older barcode scanning, there’s no need for a perfect alignment, which makes it easy for anyone to use an RFID tag.
Why Use RFID to Improve Church Safety?
RFID can be specifically programmed for each individual user. This means you can arrange to allow someone into your church building at only certain times of the day and/or particular days of the week. This allows you to prevent Sunday morning nursery volunteers from entering the children’s areas during the week, when you have a preschool program running with paid teachers and different church safety rules and regulations in place.
You can also separate your overall church design into different zones and implement RFID locking systems on interior doors. This allows you to limit access to certain areas of your church building. In this way, it’s easy to prevent band leaders from entering your children’s area, while still allowing them to enter the church building and access the worship space early on Sunday to set up, or to come over for a midweek rehearsal while that preschool program is happening in another part of your church complex.
Another advantage of RFID is having a built-in record of everyone who comes and goes from each area of your church building. This way, you can track who actually uses your church building, and be able to confirm who was in the building if there’s a church safety incident, such as a theft or vandalism.
Thinking Beyond RFID in Your Church Building
Of course, there’s more to church safety access than just RFID. Guests need to gain access to your church building as well. Instead of relying on those voice-only doorbells, you can now use the same kind of sophisticated video doorbell systems that so many of us use in our homes. Since these are set up on a wi-fi system, they’re easy to install at any stage in your church design or long after construction is finished.
You can also integrate a wired camera system in your church building during the church design phase. Everything can be monitored and controlled from a central security office. We also integrate magnetic lock systems into many church designs these days. They can be programmed to automatically release when they sense motion detection (allowing for quick escape should a fire erupt) or engaged to prevent entry to unauthorized parts of your church building.
As you can see, there are some excellent options for controlling access to your church building today. To keep up with the latest smart ideas for your church design, sign up today for our forthcoming free i3 webinars, where we discuss the latest innovations and answer your questions.