Chief Baxter and Janine Brown, a King County Sheriff’s chaplain and Pastor of Woodinville’s New Life Christian Fellowship, recently launched a Cops & Clergy program in Woodinville to build relationships and share information about crime prevention and public safety. Fourteen people participated in the first meeting, held at City Hall on Feb. 15.

Baxter said that Woodinville Police reached out to local businesses, local schools and various community groups to address a range of crime issues.

“I thought to myself, let’s step it up,” he said. “Churches are a big part of our community.”

Baxter hopes Cops & Clergy will address a wide variety of topics, starting with emergency preparedness. He said he’s always believed that in the event of a disaster, many people would go to a local church for help. In fact, many turned to churches in last year’s Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.

“Churches stepped forward,” said Baxter. “Even if the church buildings themselves were destroyed, faith communities continued to work.”

Pastor Brown helped with Katrina relief last December. She witnessed pastors of all denominations pulling together, and she came back to Woodinville understanding how important it is to build relationships now, before a natural disaster, before a crisis.

She said, “The only way a community can recover from a disaster is with faith communities and civil servants working together. Not just one agency can do all the work.”

But to be effective, churches have to be prepared. According to an informal survey taken by Washington state’s Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, 80 percent of those surveyed thought that if a disaster occurred in their area, they would be able to seek help at a local church. The survey also found that only 20 percent of the churches polled would be ready to serve their communities in that way.

In addition to emergency preparedness, Baxter would like to address topics such as local crime trends, physical security, mail and identity theft, the Citizen Corps, the school assault in Beslan, Russia, for example.

Brown said that police officers, more than anyone else, know the needs of a city. They are out in the community every day.

“As a faith community,” said Brown, “sometimes we get behind the walls of our churches and we lose track of the needs of the community.”

Faith-justice networks have been cropping up across the country to deal with a wide variety of area-specific issues such as racial tension, at-risk youth, domestic violence, identity theft, victim assistance, crime trends and emergency preparedness, to name a few.

“You can’t take a model from one city and apply it to another,” said Brown. “Each city requires its own model, designed to fit the needs of that community.”

For now, Woodinville’s Cops & Clergy is in the “getting to know one another” stage, said Brown.

She said the group has to decide “what is the need here, what is the focus, where do we go from here.”

The Reverend Alex Holt of Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church, who participated in the group’s first meeting, said, “I feel the Cops and Clergy gatherings are important because they can help us listen to each others’ authentic concerns for the people we serve. Clergy and police wear very different uniforms but they seek to heal troubled people and honor ethical codes from many traditions.”

Pastor Rick Vinther of Woodinville Community United Methodist Church, who also attended the first meeting, is excited about the potential of a Cops & Clergy program.

Pastor Vinther said, “It is important because it will increase friendship, partnership and prayer support for the city and for Chief Baxter. It will also increase fellowship and partnership with other community clergy so that churches could work together effectively to serve Woodinville. It will allow us to work together as community leaders to provide forums for our congregations and the community at large. As a Christian and as a leader, it will provide new opportunities to be a witness for Christ in our community.”=