September 11, 2026 – The Dixon Group LLC

The growth years are when organizations are busiest — and when the risk map they never drew starts to matter.

“Why plan for what God may not allow?” I have heard some version of this from sincere leaders in growing organizations for twenty years. It sounds spiritual. It is profoundly unbiblical. Here is the theology of preparedness — and the one document your board should produce this year.

Growth is intoxicating. New members, new programs, new staff, a building campaign, a second campus, a grant that doubles the budget. The growth years are when leaders are most energized, most stretched, and most likely to say: “We’ll get to the crisis plan when things settle down.”

Things do not settle down. And growth does not reduce risk. It multiplies the surface area on which risk can land — more people, more money, more data, more programs for children, more public visibility. The organization that was too small to have a crisis plan in year two is, by year six, too big not to.

The theology of preparedness

There is a strain of piety, found in many of our churches and mission organizations, that treats preparation as a failure of faith. “Why plan for what God may not allow?” “Why imagine the worst?” “Don’t we trust the Lord to handle whatever comes?”

These questions sound spiritual. They are profoundly unbiblical.

The same Bible that calls us to trust God also celebrates Joseph for storing grain during the seven fat years for the seven lean years to come. The same Jesus who told His disciples not to worry about tomorrow also told the parable of the ten virgins — five wise, five foolish — and the difference between them was preparation. The faithful steward is precisely the one who has counted the cost, who has built on rock and not sand, who has trimmed the lamp and laid in the oil.

Faith and preparation are not opposites. They are companions. Crisis preparation is not the church’s hedge against God’s absence. It is the church’s offering to a God who gifted it with foresight, intelligence, and the capacity to plan.

That reframe matters in the growth years because growth is precisely the season of “fat years.” It is when the grain is available for storage. The leader who waits for the lean years to begin preparing has misread the story.

Step 1: Identify — imagine the harm in detail

The first step of the 5-Step Plan is Identify. Before you can build a team or write a template, you must know what you are preparing for. Risk assessment is the act of imagining, in detail and without flinching, the specific ways your ministry could be wounded.

Begin with an inventory of what you have that could be damaged or lost:

People — staff, volunteers, members, and especially children and other vulnerable populations.
Property — buildings, vehicles, equipment.
Finances — bank accounts, restricted funds, donor relationships, ongoing income streams.
Data — member records, financial systems, children’s ministry registrations, donor information.
Mission and brand — the reputation of the institution and the credibility of its message.
Relationships — denominational standing, community partnerships, media relationships.

Against each asset, list the realistic threats. Then plot each risk on a simple probability-and-impact matrix. A risk that is highly probable and highly impactful — financial misconduct in a growing organization that still runs on single signatures, for instance — is your top priority. A risk that is improbable but catastrophic — a fire, an active threat — still requires planning, but on a different cadence.

The matrix is not a math exercise. It is a way of forcing leadership to prioritize honestly. And growing organizations, in my experience, have a specific blind spot: they under-rate the risks that come with the very things they are proud of. The new youth program. The new online giving platform. The new building with its new insurance obligations. Growth is where the unassessed risk lives.

The readiness audit

Once you have mapped your risks, ask whether you are ready. Take these ten questions to your board at its next meeting and score yourselves honestly:

Do you have a designated crisis communication spokesperson?
Have you conducted crisis scenario planning in the last twelve months?
Do you have pre-approved holding statement templates?
Is your leadership team trained in media relations?
Do you have an up-to-date stakeholder contact database?
Are your social media accounts secured and access-controlled?
Does your board have a crisis response protocol?
Have you reviewed your legal exposure with counsel in the last year?
Do your staff know whom to contact first if a crisis begins?
Have you identified mandatory reporters and trained them in their obligations?

Most ministries discover they cannot answer “yes” to half of these. That is normal. It is also a starting point. The audit’s purpose is not to grade you. It is to give you a clear set of next actions.

The single most important document your board can produce this year

Compile what you have learned into one page: a Crisis Readiness Profile. The format matters less than the discipline of producing it. It should include your top five to eight risks, ranked; a red-yellow-green readiness score for each; the specific gaps; your priority actions with target dates; and the named owner of each action.

Review it annually. Review it again after any significant change. Keep it in two places — a secure shared drive the crisis team can reach, and a physical copy in the senior leader’s office.

I learned the value of this discipline as Director of Integrated Marketing and Public Relations years ago. We drafted a detailed exercise in which former members of the basketball team, the choir, and the band took to social media to accuse their leaders of misconduct, sparking rumors of a cover-up. By mapping that scenario in advance, we were able to weigh the unintended consequences of our options — whether an awareness campaign would look like a distraction, whether a firm policy statement might invite false claims — before anything had happened. Walking through that dark “what if” prepared us for the realities of digital-age accusations before they materialized.

A worked scenario, even a brief one, is worth ten generic plans. When the crisis arrives, the difference between a team that has rehearsed and one that has not will be evident in the first thirty minutes.

Schedule a ninety-minute board retreat in the next sixty days. Bring the audit. Leave with a draft profile. That is what stewardship looks like in the fat years.

This article draws on Chapter 2 of my book, Crisis, What Crisis? A Guide to Crisis Communication for Churches and Non-Profits. Next in this series: why heroes don’t save institutions in crisis — teams do. The book can be found at: https://books.by/drkenn-dixon

#CrisisCommunication #NonprofitLeadership #RiskManagement #ChurchLeadership #BoardGovernance

“The sentence I have heard in nearly every crisis briefing — and why the smallest, newest organizations say it most.”

It is always uttered with sincerity. And it is always wrong. It would be more honest to say, “We never wanted to think this could happen here.” The two are not the same.

I want to speak directly to leaders of young organizations — the church plant in its third year, the non-profit that just got its first grant, the school that just opened its doors, the ministry that is still one founder and a handful of volunteers. You are the leaders most likely to believe you are immune. And you are the leaders least able to afford the belief.

The illusion of immunity

The illusion of immunity is not a minor leadership blind spot. It is a structural sin of organizations — a kind of quiet pride that wraps itself in the language of faith. We say “God is in control” and use it to avoid the discomfort of imagining how things might go wrong. We confuse a doctrine of providence with a strategy of denial.

We forget that Joseph stored grain through seven fat years not because he doubted the dream God had given Pharaoh, but because he believed it.

Founding-stage organizations carry a specific version of this illusion. It sounds like: We’re too small to be a target. We all know each other. Nobody’s watching us. We’ll build the systems when we’re bigger.

Every one of those sentences is a vulnerability wearing the costume of humility.

Why small is not safe

The statistical reality is unsentimental. In any given year, somewhere in the church world, a pastor will face an allegation. A treasurer will be found to have falsified accounts. A child will be injured at a youth event. A laptop with member data will be stolen. A sermon clip will go viral and be quoted by media that has never set foot in the building. These events are not anomalies. They are the texture of institutional life in a fallen world.

And small organizations are not exempt from that texture. They are exposed to it in particular ways:

The trust-based culture that lowers financial controls. A young organization with one signature on the checking account and a treasurer everyone loves is the textbook setting for financial misconduct — not because the people are bad, but because the structure invites it.
The volunteer workforce that complicates background checks. When everyone is a volunteer and everyone is a friend, the awkward conversation about screening gets postponed.
The children’s programming that increases liability exposure long before there is a policy manual to govern it.
The donor dependency that magnifies any reputational hit. A young organization with twelve major donors can be undone by the loss of three.

For a business, trust is one currency among several. For a church or a non-profit, trust is the whole currency. People come because they believe — at some level not always articulated — that this is a place where what is said is true, where what is given is used as promised, and where what is vulnerable is protected. Every crisis is an assault on that triad. And a young organization has not yet built the reserves of trust that let an older institution survive one.

What a crisis actually is

Let me define the term, because founders sometimes hear “crisis” and picture something that only happens to institutions with legal departments.

A crisis is any event that threatens the mission, reputation, safety, or legal standing of an organization and that cannot be managed by normal operational rhythms. Most days, most ministries are managing incidents — disruptions, complaints, controversies — that an attentive leader and a competent team can absorb. A crisis occurs when the organization’s normal absorptive capacity is overwhelmed.

Notice what that definition implies. The smaller your absorptive capacity, the lower your crisis threshold. An incident that a large denomination shrugs off can be existential for a church plant. Small organizations do not face fewer crises. They face crises sooner.

The one thing to do this year

I am not asking a founding-stage leader to build a full crisis communication plan in year one. I am asking for one thing: settle the prior question.

Before any leader learns the techniques of crisis response — the holding statement, the media training, the social media protocol — they must settle this: Are we willing to tell the truth at cost?

Every effort to protect an institution by concealing what should be told accelerates the destruction of the institution. The cover-up is always more damaging than the crisis. That is not a public relations observation. It is a spiritual one. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” was not said about epistemology. It was said about the bondage of accumulated falsehood — the kind that grows in organizations that decided, early and quietly, that reputation mattered more than honesty.

Founders set culture. The decisions you make in the first three years about what gets disclosed, what gets discussed at the board table, and what gets handled “quietly” will still be shaping the organization thirty years from now, long after you are gone. The first crisis communication competency is not media training. It is the willingness, formed long before the storm, to tell the truth at cost.

Ask your leadership team to write one paragraph this week in answer to a single question: What is the difference between protecting our reputation and telling the truth? Discuss the answers at your next meeting. You will learn more about your organization’s future from that conversation than from any risk assessment.

The crisis is not a question of if. Only of when. Prepare anyway.

This article draws on the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my book, Crisis, What Crisis? A Guide to Crisis Communication for Churches and Non-Profits — Book One of a trilogy on crisis leadership for mission-driven organizations. Next in this series: why preparation is stewardship, not faithlessness. To get a copy of the book: https://books.by/drkenn-dixon

#CrisisCommunication #NonprofitLeadership #ChurchLeadership #Stewardship #CrisisManagement

Day: September 11, 2026

Preparation Is Stewardship, Not Faithlessness