By Samuel Williams, Jr., Contributing Writer
There are a series of truths facing nationwide church leaders when it comes to creating a safe worship environment for congregants. In essence, churches seemingly are no longer considered a Christian’s hallowed ground or safe sanctuary in the 21st century.
The realistic truth is while America buries its collective heads in the sand, at some point and time, the nation must face the fact that native Christians to the United States are being targeted and murdered directly on their worship campuses. Carl Chinn, author of Evil Invades Sanctuary tracks shootings and other attacks on houses of worship. In 2012, he counted 75 deaths from attacks at faith-based groups. There were 135 “deadly force incidents” in 2013 and 638 since he starting tracking incidents in 1999. Guns were used in more than half the incidents.
The shocking truth is that since Chinn’s church shooting data has been accumulated as far back as 2013, five years later, church attacks have become more aggressive, brazen, and deadly. In 2015, Dylann Roof gunned down nine members of Emanuel AME Church, located in Charleston, South Carolina. The victims were brutally gunned down while they prayed after the completion of Bible study. In 2017, 26 Christians were slain in Plato, Texas, when a shooter named Devin Kelley entered the church with guns blazing. The attacks shared one common shooter trait while the style of attacks varied greatly. The common trait that both shooters shared was that both were men in their 20s and both allegedly suffered from some form of mental illness.
One sad truth for the Connectional AME Churches is that in June 2015, Roof, then 21, a high school dropout, and an avowed white supremacist, was convicted in December 2016 on 33 counts of federal hate crimes. In January, jurors sentenced him to death. A report from a psychological evaluation commissioned by his attorneys stated that Roof was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder “based on the presence of symptoms of social communication challenges and atypical behaviors.” It further stated that his autism symptoms cut him off from society and “without input from competing viewpoints, Roof went online, read and believed misinformation about African Americans, and developed a strong preoccupation with racism. Even sadder is that this church shooting was written off as a hate crime since Roof’s end game was to ignite a race war.
The sobering truth, and the one that put church leaders nationwide on alert that Christians were indeed targeted, was Kelly’s deadly mass shooting at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Kelley killed 26 people, including the 14-year-old daughter of the church’s pastor, and injured even more. Kelley, age 26 at the time of the shooting, was once a member of the US Air Force and served in logistics readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, starting in 2010. Kelley was court-martialed in 2012 for two counts of Article 128 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, assault on his spouse and assault on their child. Kelley received a bad conduct discharge, confinement for 12 months, and a reduction in rank, she said. Clearly, he had issues.
Samuel Williams, Jr. is a licentiate minister under the Rev. Dr. Lee P. Washington at Reid Temple AME Church in Glenn Dale. Williams is also a second-year Master of Divinity student at Payne Theological Seminary. Williams is an internationally-published author who holds the distinction of being the first African American writer to pen a major Sherlock Holmes adventure (Anomalous: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes featuring Jack Johnson and Alphonse Capone). Williams has over two decades experience as a journalist and grant writer. In addition, he currently serves as Board of Director President of the Riverdale Park Arts Council (RPAC).
