One of the more depressing news stories of the past week — and there were many — was one on last Monday’s front page headlined “N.H. Group to Hold Active Shooter Training for Churches.” In it, staff writer Jordan Cuddemi reported that the New Hampshire Council of Churches had scheduled a free program to train clergy and other church members in how to respond when confronted with a mass shooting in their places of worship. What a sad commentary it is that now “where two or three are gathered together in my name,” they might be gunned down by a madman.

The immediate impetus for offering the training was last month’s massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in which 26 churchgoers were killed and another 20 wounded. Other mass shootings at churches in recent years include the killing of nine people by a white supremacist in 2015 at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., and one five years ago at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, where six people died at the hands of a gunman who also had ties to white supremacist groups.

Cuddemi interviewed several local clergy members who told her that sad as it is, the time has come to plan for the worse. “I think it is so much better to be prepared and never have to use it than to be unprepared,” said the Rev. Becca Girrell of Lebanon United Methodist Church. “It is a terribly sad realization, but that is the place we are in as a country.”

To be sure, pastors across the country must be profoundly unsettled when the slaughter of innocents takes place in sanctified surroundings. If sanctuary means anything, it means being safe to worship as one sees fit. And if training programs enhance a congregation’s confidence that their church truly is a sacred refuge, then that’s probably a good argument for participating.

But it is important to keep things in perspective. The chances of being killed by a mass shooter during any given church service are almost vanishingly remote. (This number is far beyond our poor powers to calculate, but one figure we have seen is one in 6 million.) And in the context of churches, preparation may exact a psychological price. To whatever extent such training stokes the fear that one might become a victim, it may inhibit the willingness of some people to congregate at all. Additionally, most church doctrine emphasizes the importance of welcoming strangers. Churches will certainly need to recognize that there is an inherent tension between that mission and some of the precautions intended to enhance safety.

More than that, such training is focused on minimizing the toll of mass shootings, not dealing with their lethal cause. Mass shootings are not what lawyers and insurers sometimes refer to, ironically in this case, as “acts of God.” They are not natural disasters, but rather terrible acts of human agency that cannot be assuaged merely by invoking God’s blessing on the victims, as President Trump did after the Sutherland Springs and Las Vegas massacres, or by contemplating the nature of pure evil.

The plain fact is that although these dreadful crimes are usually rooted in a maze of grievance (and much less often in mental illness), they are all too often facilitated by ready access to high-powered, rapid-fire, military-style rifles. Banning those weapons, which are designed to kill large numbers of people quickly, is not only a public policy question; it is also a moral issue — and not a very complex one at that. Who is better situated to use the bully pulpit, or indeed their actual pulpit, to make that case to faith communities than their leaders? The world of mass shootings in church may be the world we are living in now, but it is not the world we are condemned to live in forever. From civil rights to Vietnam to homelessness and hunger, religious leaders have made important real-world contributions to advancing values consistent with the moral teachings of their faiths through advocacy, protest and prayer. We realize that we are preaching to the choir here in some cases, but there’s a lot more work to be done by clergy and flock on this front.