Pastoral Letter to the Church after Mother Emanuel AME Church Shootings

We began our worship at Mission Bend United Methodist Church this Sunday with the words below. The things we pray for, living Lord, may we have the grace to labor for.

“We think of Christ as our peace;
we may call ourselves true Christians only
if our lives express Christ by our own peace.”
—Gregory of Nyssa (4th century, Asia Minor)

“The doors of the church are open.”

These words are often used to begin worship in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. And the doors of the church were open this past Wednesday, June 17th, 2015 as a dozen African-American members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC met for Bible study. They were reading from Mark 4, where Jesus instructs his disciples “when trouble or persecution comes because of the word…,” and discussion had gone on for about an hour before a thirteenth participant, who was white, took out a gun and began shooting. Nine of those gathered died.

At Mission Bend, I am blessed to pastor a faith community that is multiracial and cross-cultural. In our worship and our ministries, in our leadership and our servanthood, as we play in the Father’s house and work in the Spirit’s power, we have we have known the joy of building relationships across lines of race and nation: bonds of friendship rather than enmity. Especially as we have gathered to study the Word of God, with its promise of freedom and hope to every human being, unity in the midst of difference, and kinship through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we remember those who laid down their lives around the Gospel of Peace.

Many are decrying the racism and supremacy that leads to such violence and terror. While I have experienced neither miniature aggressions on a daily basis nor such an explosion of murderous hatred because of my color, today I add my voice to repudiate and condemn it.

Others have suggested that Christianity is under attack, and that we should prepare ourselves to respond appropriately. In answer, I can only say that the racially-motivated slaughter of nine African Methodist Episcopal pastors and laypersons is indeed an attack on Christian faith, for Christ abolishes power and privilege based on genetic inheritance, national identity, and social allegiance.

“Thanks to Christ Jesus,” writes the Apostle Paul to the church at Ephesus, “you who once were so far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Christ is our peace. He made both Jews and Gentiles into one group. With his body, he broke down the barrier of hatred that divided us…So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household.”

Brothers and sisters, we belong to one another—

• Jews and Gentiles
• immigrants and strangers
• black and white
• United Methodist and African Methodist Episcopal—

we belong to God and each other. And such belonging is always hazardous, for enemies earthly and spiritual cannot abide the peace of Jesus Christ.

So, yes, we should be prepared for what could easily come our way. But our response will not be to procure weapons and build bigger arsenals, furthering the death and destruction which is the work of demonic forces, not divine. Rather, we will meet hostility with hospitality, guns with grace, danger with discipleship—that is, apprenticeship to the Prince of Peace.

And because Jesus, whom we call Lord and Teacher, tutors us to pray for our enemies, we also pray for the one who killed so many. Finally, we pray for ourselves, our churches, and our country, that the virulent plague of racism may be swiftly diagnosed and eradicated from our common life, in order that Christ might build us “into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”

Read the Pastoral Letter from Bishop Janice Riggle Huie (Houston Episcopal Area, The United Methodist Church).

Learn more about Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Rev. Clementa Pinckney.