School shooting ‘froze us in place,’ minister says
When it comes to baptism, Jason Flowers knows just what to say.
“I can talk all day an night and into the next day about baptism in the Bible,” the minister told his congregation, the Winder Church of Christ in northeast Georgia. The same goes for forgiveness of sins. He also has experience comforting grieving families after the unexpected loss of a loved one.
But Flowers found himself at a loss for words after his community became the victim of a school shooting on Sept. 4. At Apalachee High School, less than four miles from the Winder church’s building, a 14-year-old student opened fire, killing four people and wounding nine more, the Associated Press reported.
The teen surrendered to police, and authorities charged the youth as an adult with using an assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers in the hallway outside his algebra classroom.
Police interviewed the youth more than a year ago while looking into online posts threatening a school shooting, but investigators didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest, the AP reported.
On the evening after the shooting, hundreds gathered in Jug Tavern Park in downtown Winder for an ecumenical prayer vigil.
“We have members that have kids that go to that school,” a member of the Winder Church of Christ told The Christian Chronicle via Facebook Messenger the next morning. “None were harmed, but this is very tragic.”
For the congregation, which has a Sunday attendance of about 50, all of the terrible stories of previous school shootings, seen on their TVs, computers and mobile devices, became deeply personal.
“The black, scaly finger of evil came in and touched our soul,” Flowers said, “and it froze us in place. It hit us and knocked us back. … It’s not just academic anymore. We can’t scroll past it. It reaches in and stops our heart.”
“It’s not just academic anymore. We can’t scroll past it. It reaches in and stops our heart.”
The minister asked the congregation to turn in their Bibles to Psalm 10, when King David cried out to God, “Why do You stand afar off, O Lord? Why do You hide in times of trouble?”
David, pursued by enemies including King Saul and even his own son, Absalom, cried out to God repeatedly, Flowers said. So did Christian martyrs including Stephen. So did Jesus himself as he hung on the cross, repeating the words of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
But the psalms that begin with laments almost always end with assurances that “God sees our troubles,” the minister said. Later in Psalm 10, David declares, “But You have seen, for You observe trouble and grief, To repay it by Your hand. The helpless commits himself to You; You are the helper of the fatherless.”
People pray for the victims of The Covenant School shooting during a community vigil in Mt. Juliet, Tenn.
For Churches of Christ in Nashville, Tenn., the latest school shooting evokes painful memories of March 27, 2023, when a shooter killed seven people — three of them 9-year-old students — at The Covenant School in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood.
The private Presbyterian school of about 200 students and 40 staff resumed classes about a month later in the building of the Brentwood Hills Church of Christ. The 1,200-member congregation, which meets about five miles from Covenant’s campus, hosted the school through April of this year, when faculty, staff and students returned to their remodeled campus.
Brad Montague, a Christian writer, illustrator and Church of Christ member, drew this sketch in an airport after the March 27, 2023, school shooting in Nashville, Tenn. He posted the illustration to social media after the shooting in Winder, Ga. “The emotion and message remain true,” Montague wrote.
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