There is a particular kind of document that exists in a lot of church offices: forty pages, produced two years ago by someone who has since moved away, in a binder nobody has opened. It is thorough. It is compliant. It is also, functionally, not a plan — because a plan is something people use under stress, and nobody reads forty pages under stress.
The plan that works is roughly one page, and it answers six questions. Here they are, with the traps in each.
1. Who coordinates — and who does if they cannot?
Name one person. Then name their deputy. Then name the deputy's deputy, because in a genuinely bad event your first two names may be dealing with their own flooded house or unreachable family.
The trap here is diplomatic rather than practical: churches avoid naming one person because it feels like a slight to everyone else. Resolve it in advance, in the calm, in writing. The alternative is resolving it at 6am while people wait for someone to make a decision.
2. How do we reach each other if the usual way fails?
Assume the church WhatsApp group is unavailable — no power, no data, no phone mast. What then? A phone tree on paper. A pre-agreed physical meeting point and time. A designated person who walks to a designated house.
It feels absurdly low-tech, right up until the moment it is the only thing that works. Write down the actual numbers, on actual paper, in more than one place — a contact list that only exists inside a dead phone is not a contact list.
3. Who do we check on first?
This is your care list, and it is the single highest-value page in the whole document. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and one line on what specifically makes each person vulnerable — no car, oxygen concentrator, three young children and no family nearby, recently bereaved, does not speak much English.
Assign each name to a specific person now. "Someone will check on Margaret" is how Margaret gets missed. "David checks on Margaret" is how she does not.
This list also needs a review date, because it goes stale quietly. Twice a year is enough. Mapping who is actually in your church's world — with something like Oikos Map or simply a shared sheet — makes the review a half-hour job instead of a project.
4. What can our building honestly offer?
Be specific and be honest. Does the hall have heating that works when it is properly cold? A kitchen you could actually cook fifty meals in? Accessible toilets? A generator, or a way to get one? Is there parking for a delivery lorry? Is the building itself in a place that floods?
Write down what you have, not what you would like to have. A church that accurately says "we can offer a warm room and a kettle, not accommodation" is far more useful to a coordinator than one that overstates and has to walk it back.
5. Who else would we call?
Three or four nearby churches, with a named person and a mobile number for each. Your municipality's emergency contact. The community centre. The school. Whichever local business has the generator, the van, or the freezer.
The point is not the list. It is that making the list forces the phone calls that create the relationships, and those relationships are what let a neighbourhood be divided up in ten minutes instead of three days. Introduce yourself now; it is a much easier conversation than the one where you introduce yourself during a crisis.
The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.
6. How do we decide to stop?
Almost no church plan includes this, and it is why so many responses end in exhaustion rather than in a decision. Write down, in advance, what the wind-down looks like: how you hand ongoing needs to whoever is best placed to carry them, how you make sure your own people get rest, and what signals tell you the acute phase is over.
Naming this in the calm gives your future, tired self permission to stop — and makes it far more likely your church is still standing for the long recovery, which is the part that actually needs you.
Then do the thing most churches skip
Read it aloud with the people named in it. Not a drill — a conversation, twenty minutes, once a year. Ask each person to say what they would do first. You will find the gaps immediately, and they are almost never where you expected.
Then put a copy on paper somewhere in the building, and a copy in the homes of the three named coordinators. A plan that exists only in cloud storage is a plan that exists only while the internet does.
Where to start today
If you have nothing, do not start with the document. Start with the free Church Readiness Check — seven questions, about two minutes, nothing sent anywhere — and it returns a printable plan with one concrete next step for each gap. Then print the care list template and fill in the first ten names.
Ten names on paper this week beats a perfect binder next year.