A 5-year-old holds a sign reading “No More Newtowns” in a gun control rally in New York. (Courtesy of AP)

In the heat of the national gun debate, Texas schools have taken a stand, and some are training teachers to carry firearm. Schools are not alone, though, in their search to protect the people who go there.

With a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other, Texas churches are standing their ground.

The National Organization of Church Security and Safety Management, NOCSSM, which is based in Frisco, Texas, openly supports guns on its Facebook page.

Churches throughout Texas send members to be trained as security guards at state schools, like the Christian Security Institute, a member company of NOCSSM, but after the written portion of the class is over, there are other questions to be answered.

“A guy comes up to somebody with a knife, that’s deadly force. How are you going to address that?” Chuck Chadwick, president of Gatekeepers Security, said.

Having guns inside the church, Chadwick said, is the answer when confronted with gun violence because outside help frequently arrives too late.

“What we see in an active shooter incident, [is that] it’s going to be contained to whoever’s there at the time,” Chadwick said.

Chadwick teaches classes with Gatekeepers Security, training members of participating churches to be security guards.

“Our founding scripture is 1 Chronicles 9:21 where it talks the gatekeepers,” Chadwick said. “They were stationed in biblical days, and they were the armed guys that were on the north and south and east and west.”

One participating church, the Christ Chapel Bible Church in Fort Worth, uses volunteers to protect members of its congregation, but with a membership of thousands, COO Rick Neves said it takes more than volunteer guards to make sure members are secure.

“At different times, we have uniformed police officers that work here in the evenings and the mornings,” Neves said, “and they are armed, and, of course, like any other business, we’ve got alarm systems and things like that.”

Christ Chapel and other churches have taken to treating their churches like businesses, so when the saints go marching in, they don’t have to be armed soldiers.