- The Uvalde School Shooting Sends Me to Matthew 18
Jesus gave specific instructions on caring for the “little ones.” The Texas tragedy suggests the church has gravely fallen short.I remember being 10. I had just discovered a passion for soccer and watched the entire World Cup for the first time alongside my father and my brother.I embarked on my first mission trip with my church that year to the sierras of Chihuahua, Mexico, where I was fascinated by the idea of one day doing ministry full-time.I remember being 18. I had graduated high school a semester earlier and had moved to Alabama for a few months before starting college in the fall. My family was no longer together, and my mother had to work all the time because she was now a single parent of two kids.I knew I wanted to leave those difficult experiences behind and study college away from home. Today I can tell you that I did not know much more at 18 than I knew at 10.As a journalist and minister who has found a home in Texas, I’ve reflected on these stages of my life as I’ve mourned the tragedy currently crushing the Latino community—an additional chapter to our often painful history. As we so dreadfully now know, on Tuesday, 19 children, ages 9, 10, and 11, were murdered by one who had reached 18 a little more than a week earlier.The victims loved their moms, celebrated first Communions, and made honor roll. They were children who, just like me years ago, might have watched their first World Cup with their dads and brothers later this very year.The person who murdered these children was a man barely on the other side of childhood—one who, as Brennan Manning writes, was “broken on the wheels of living.” We know only the surface of what Salvador Ramos’s life was like: a parent struggling with drug addiction, bullying that targeted his speech impediment, violence that intensified as he grew older.As we ...Continue reading...
- 1 day ago 27 May 22, 8:35pm -
- 15 Prayers for a Violent World
In an age weary with suffering, how can we pray?As the father of two elementary-aged children, the news of the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas—just three hours south of my home in Austin, which resulted in the death of 19 children and 2 teachers—shook me deeply.Driving my daughter to school the morning after, I felt acutely the fragility and unpredictability of life, and I found myself becoming intensely afraid—and increasingly angry.Only 10 days prior, a racially motivated 18-year-old man, dressed in body armor and wielding a rifle with a high-capacity magazine, shot and killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket, wounding 3 others. Eleven of the 13 victims were Black.A day after the mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets store in upstate New York, a gunman entered Geneva Presbyterian Church, in Laguna Woods, California—where a group of parishioners had gathered for a lunch to honor a former pastor of a Taiwanese congregation that uses the church for its worship services—and shot and killed one person and wounded five others.One nation bombs another, a denomination keeps a secret list of abusive pastors, a man is profiled because of his skin color, a Christian is persecuted because of her faith, and thousands are cruelly displaced from their homes—all of it occurring against the backdrop of a global pandemic.It’s tempting to shut down emotionally in light of all of this violence. It’s tempting to give into despair. “So goes the world,” we might say, wishing it were otherwise but feeling powerless to make a difference. It’s tempting to distract ourselves with busywork or to reach for spiritual platitudes to numb the pain. “Let go and let God.” “God works ...Continue reading...
- 1 day ago 27 May 22, 3:00pm -
- Passion Rekindled: Oberammergau Easter Play Returns with Great Joy
Tourists and pilgrims flock to German village as 1,800 local actors prepare to take the stage after pandemic interruption.Jill and Oscar Schmidt vowed that they would travel from their home in Washington State to Oberammergau, a small village in the south of Germany, to see the world-famous passion play about the death of Jesus.They wanted to go in 2010 but didn’t get tickets in time. So they decided they would not miss the next performance—no excuses!—and made plans for the spring of 2020.“Then they were cancelled,” said Jill.The Schmidts understood, of course. Everything was shutting down at that time, as the pandemic swept across the world and dominated the headlines. But that makes this moment, two years later, very sweet.“We are so glad to finally be here,” Jill told CT, “and experience the play at least once in our lifetime.”This desire—to experience the Oberammergau Passion Play once in a lifetime— has driven millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit the village over the years. It began in 1633 with another vow. Suffering the ravages of the bubonic plague, the inhabitants of the Bavarian village promised to perform a “play of the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ" on stage every ten years if God would spare them further death and devastation. The plague ended, and the people of Oberammergau have been putting on the passion play ever since.In the 19th century, it began to draw in international visitors, mostly Catholics and Lutherans. Today, a third of the 1 million guests are from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. The play resonates in this moment with the feeling of surviving a pandemic, but it has long spoken to the themes of crisis and overcoming hardship. The production, after all, retells the story of Jesus’ ...Continue reading...
- 2 days ago 27 May 22, 2:00pm -
- Uvalde Pastors Mourn Losses Close to Home
A Hispanic Baptist leader focuses on ministering to his family after his great-granddaughter dies in the school shooting. In the quiet, 16,000-person town of Uvalde, Texas, nearly everyone has connections to the children, families, and teachers shaken by the deadly elementary school shooting.“I was watering my flowers in the front yard when I heard shots ring out,” said Julian Moreno, former pastor of Primera Iglesia Bautista. Moreno lives two blocks from Robb Elementary School, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 kids and two teachers on Tuesday.Within minutes of hearing the shots, Moreno said he saw two policemen running down the street. Then, an exchange of gunfire so close he could smell the powder.Knowing his great-granddaughter, Lexi, was a student at the school, Moreno walked to the campus once the shots ceased.He later learned that the attack took place in 10-year-old Lexi’s classroom, and she was among the victims.Outside the school, Moreno said, the atmosphere radiated with fear, as parents clamored to get into the barricaded building. Officers with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and Border Patrol shouted at one another as they put on their gear and approached the school.“People were talking loudly, a lot were crying,” he said. “They were saying, ‘My son or my daughter is in that building,’ and the officers were just saying ‘I’m sorry, you can’t go any further.’”Located 80 miles west of San Antonio, an hour from the Mexican border, the town of Uvalde is 82 percent Hispanic, with sizable Catholic and Baptist populations. Around 20 local churches have joined together to support their community, now known as the location of the third-deadliest school shooting in the US.Because he’s a faith leader, people in the community have turned to ...Continue reading...
- 2 days ago 27 May 22, 1:34am -
- Buffalo’s Black Christians Grieve the ‘Evil Among Us’
Angry but not shocked at racist violence, the victims' families at funerals this week have a prayer: Let these deaths not be in vain. Buffalo this week is bearing the heaviness of 10 funerals all at once.Even though organizers tried to stagger funeral times, hundreds of cars converged on one cemetery on Wednesday for back-to-back burials. One local congregation, Elim Christian Fellowship, held memorials two days in a row this week, gathering hundreds to cry, sing, and proclaim that death did not have the last word over the loved ones they lost.The church called for 30 days of mourning in honor of longtime member Celestine Chaney, 65. Chaney was among the 10 people killed in a racist attack at their local grocery store back on May 14. Most of the victims were devout Christians, active in Black churches in Buffalo.The city’s Christians aren’t rushing the grieving process, even as national news reporters have left town and attention has shifted to a horrifying shooting at a Texas elementary school.“I’m sure God is angry with what he sees,” said Bishop Glenwood Young Sr., who leads the Church of God in Christ in Western New York. Young’s sister-in-law, 77-year-old Pearl Young, was one of the victims at Tops Friendly Market.The grief and anger in Buffalo is different than after other recent mass shootings. The shooter, based on officials’ accounts, targeted Black people because of his white supremacist beliefs. He killed the elderly, people who were called mother and auntie by their friends and neighbors. The incident added to the poor neighborhood’s troubles by creating a food desert, with the grocery store indefinitely closed after the shooting.At the funerals and around the community, conversations swelled with righteous anger. CT heard from people who held to a firm belief that God would do something to address ...Continue reading...
- 2 days ago 27 May 22, 12:00am -