After the mass shooting in a church in Texas many congregations around the country have posed the inevitable question: Should we be preparing for something similar in our congregation? It is a natural question, I think. And it is important to provide more than a knee-jerk response.
What do we not want to do? We don't want to fuel fear, panic or the siege mentality. We don't want church to resemble an armed military outpost.
What do we want to do? We want Christians to attend worship and feel as safe and secure as one can in a crowd. We want to be proactive. We want to make choices that don't diminish our identity and calling as Christians. Of course, there is a spectrum of responses in Christian communities.
As we weigh many options, several aspects come to mind as foundational:
- There is no such thing as absolute safety in life, except ultimately in God. Absolute safety is an unobtainable illusion. To spend one's time trying to secure absolute safety by avoiding any risk can lead to a life of fear, defensiveness, and hyper-vigilance, all of which diminish life itself. A perfectly safe person could never go anywhere outside their home. In fact, they are often hurt in their home.
- Some practices are counter-Christian in and of themselves and if adopted raise the question, "If this is what we have become why pretend to be followers of Jesus?"
- There is a "spirit" held by a whole group of people, especially congregations of Christians. The practices we adopt actually foster one kind of spirit more than another; it is never neutral. Do we foster a spirit of fear or a spirit of faith and trust?
- Instead of simply attempting to protect ourselves we need to ask why it is that the situation exists in the first place and ask what we might do about the underlying causes. It is not enough, as the old story goes, to keep pulling drowned people out of the river without asking why are so many people drowning upstream.
All this simply places practical solutions in a creative tension with the ethical and theological dimensions. We must not only ask "What do we do?" but "Why do we do it?"
Such are the messy and times in which we live. There have been more terrible eras in history that have included genocides, civil wars and ethnic cleansing. But massive, reoccurring, deadly citizen-on-citizen violence defining a whole new normal? How have we become this sick? Why is such sickness accepted as inevitable? Is our sickness like a communicable disease, spreading like a virus?
Prayer is called for on many levels. The kind of prayer that is unhelpful is the superficial sort that repeatedly prays for the latest victims. The kind of prayer that makes a difference now quickens the conscience and leads to redemptive action. To that we should all give ourselves.
