Biblical Readiness

Biblical Readiness is the foundation for becoming ready to respond spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically to crisis needs in your city. Biblical Readiness training provides you with an in-depth understanding of the foundations of Biblical Readiness - spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. Learn what Biblical Readiness is, assess how Biblically Ready your Christian community currently is, and learn the principles that will strengthen your city’s Biblical Readiness.

Getting Started | Unified Leadership

As a ReadyCity leader you will bring local churches and the Christian community together to respond to emergencies, big and small. Emergencies are best responded to locally, making the Christian community the largest untapped network of resources, programs, facilities and volunteers. Tapping these resources and guiding Christians in your city to pray, care, and share with people in crisis and disaster requires special abilities.

Learn to lead Christian community leaders to:

• Influence and model Christ-like service
• Build leadership relationships that can bring people together for common purpose
• Form a leadership team that can model, promote, and train others in Biblical Readiness
• Find a pathway to build capacity in the Christian community to respond together

Planning l Engaging Community Partners

The ReadyCity training is unique in that it identifies the resources and strengths already built into your city by networking already established organizations and individuals together. Networking with government, law enforcement, emergency response, churches and other community leaders can be like entering a new world and learning a new language. The ReadyCity process provides your entire Christian community with an infrastructure to sustain a collaborative Christian response to disasters and emergencies that may spring up within your community.

Discover how to:

• Ask strategic questions to assess community needs
• Facilitate agreements among various Christian and/or city groups to pool resources
• Recruit leaders who will work in unity and bring a strong, united Christian response
• Network church and community leaders to prepare and respond to emergencies
• Develop a strategy for expanding the emergency capabilities of the ReadyCity

Planning | Identifying Community Resources

The Christian community can have a big impact in your city. Learn how to assess your community’s resource capacity to respond to crisis in the city along with some practical steps in getting any Christian organization, no matter its size, ready to respond in emergencies. Download the Capacity Assessment Worksheets to discover what your Christian community already has available internally to respond, the potential risks in your city, and the organizational information that can be utilized in times of crisis to bring a Biblical Response.

Planning | Risk Assessment

Knowing the risks that your city faces and the impact that those risks would have on your Christian community are the first steps to being able to develop effective response plans. Assess what risks your city faces using the Risk Assessment Template. Identify what the potential impacts on the local Christian community would be using the Impact Analysis Template.

Planning | Response Plans

Once the Christian community has evaluated their capacity, identified their city’s risks and the impact of those risks on their Christian community’s operations, the next readiness step is to develop what is known as Emergency Response Plans. An Emergency Response plan is a series of plans that detail how the ReadyCity will respond as a Christian community to the needs that arise from a crisis or disaster. The plans that are discussed include:

• Emergency Operations Plan
• Ministry Continuity Plan
• Emergency Operations Center Plan
• Emergency Response Plan

Implementation | Equipping the ReadyCity

Do the organizations in your Christian community know what it means to be Biblically Ready? Do they understand the emergency plans that your city has set in place? Are they familiar with the system that would alert members to evacuate, shelter or lockdown? Do they know who is in charge during an emergency? Do they know who is authorized to speak with the news media? Is everyone familiar with their responsibilities for providing facility and information security? Can they carry out their assigned responsibilities during an emergency or church disruption? This training shows you how to equip your Christian community to develop Biblical readiness and to be ready to respond, using the other CEN Ready Programs – ReadyChristian and ReadyChurch.

Implementation | Activating the ReadyCity

When is it appropriate to share Christ in emergencies? Are there federal rules against proselytizing if we are responding to a disaster? What is an effective way to share Christ when people are facing crises? These and many more questions will be addressed in Activating the ReadyCity. Using the creation of prayer-care-share teams, discover ways that you can be effective at sharing the gospel in times of crisis.

Exercise | Is Your City Ready?

Evaluating the effectiveness of your current program is essential to knowing how Biblically Ready your Christian community really is. Making sure your Christian community knows what to do and finding any areas that can be improved are vital to the success of your ReadyCity’s Biblical Response. We recommend doing this evaluation through a series of questions and scenarios known as a “table top exercise.” Through these exercises, Is Your City Ready will help…

• Clarify roles and responsibilities of your unified leaders
• Reinforce knowledge of procedures, facilities, systems and equipment
• Improve individual performance as well as organizational coordination and communications
• Evaluate policies, plans, procedures and the knowledge and skills of your emergency team members
• Reveal weaknesses and resource gaps
• Comply with local laws, codes and regulations
• Gain recognition for the emergency management and ministry continuity program
• Introduce a tabletop exercise

A ReadyCity recognizes that unless the Church is replicating its own faith by praying for, caring for, and sharing Christ with others in loving and kind ways, it is not really ready itself. Look carefully at the scripture from 1 Timothy 2:1-4:

“First, I tell you to pray for all people, asking God for what they need and being thankful to Him. Pray for rulers and for all who have authority so that we can have quiet and peaceful lives full of worship and respect for God.

This is good, and it pleases God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to know the truth.” (NCV)

Notice principles that flow. Prayer is first for all people, a thankful attitude, and a focus upon peace through lives filled with worship and the love of God. This is what pleases our Lord.

As Christians, we must have a balance, and it begins with a grounded personal relationship with Jesus Christ that allows us to trust in faith for rescue and protection as well as the strength to help others around us. It is also important as believers that we are realistically knowledgeable of the risks and capacities within our grasp and have skills and emotional stamina to recover from crisis. All four areas of spiritual, emotional, mental and physical preparedness are important. Any one weak area will affect all the others. It is our faith in Christ that allows us to face any crisis head-on. Without Him, we will fall short – either immediately or within days or years.

How do we, as a Christian community, become Biblically ready to first survive, then thrive, and finally respond in faith to others around us when crisis comes? A secular medical study revealed this statistic: 90% of those in crisis ask, “Where is God in this?” People either turn toward Him or away from Him – sometimes for a lifetime. Are we prepared to give an answer in both word and action? As Christians, it is not enough to have all of this strength and then withhold it or hide it; we must share it with others who are facing their own crisis too. We are co-laborers with Christ as others seek to find victory over tragedies. We cannot do it alone, and neither can others. There is a Biblical Standard that we must live out obediently as faithful followers of Christ in order that we may be found pleasing to Him.

The Bible gives us a standard for our lives. In this section:

1. You will learn that we become stronger working together than we are separately when we partner with other churches, Christian organizations and media to support and hold each other accountable for readiness in the Church, in the life of each congregant, and in your community emergency outreach.
2. You will train the City Emergency Team (CET) Officers to lead in the development of a ReadyCity emergency plan, its training, and the oversight of emergency responses within the Christian community of your city as well as the outward responses to emergencies near and far.

Biblical readiness means being spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically ready to respond to emergencies as faithful Christ-followers by praying, caring for survivors, and sharing the hope we have in Jesus Christ.

While we may not have ever thought about it this way, there is a Biblical Readiness Standard of measurement that scriptures have clearly laid out for us in both the Old and New Testaments. It could be the modeling of Nehemiah rebuilding the spiritual walls of unity by working together to restore the Church; or Noah focusing on a huge family project by preparing the ark as God had specifically laid out for their protection and ours; or Joseph, who under great duress, did not fail to prepare for the days ahead. The Bible gives us role models to understand our times and circumstances – to get ourselves completely ready in mind, body and soul to survive that we may stand strong in crisis so that others may find hope in Christ too.