When Blacks Kill Blacks, the Pastor Shows Up
The church does not show up for the spectacular moments only. It shows up in emergency rooms at two in the morning when everyone else has left.
Nothing in my personal experience or my academic training prepared me for what happened the night a 17-year-old boy was killed by mistaken identity and his mother, a member of my congregation, needed her pastor.
She was a single mother. He was her only son. And I met her in the emergency room.
I had been in difficult rooms before. I had ridden in the command car with police on one of the most tense nights of my ministry. But nothing compared to what I walked into that night. The emergency room was packed with friends, family, and grieving young people. Carloads of gang members were circling the hospital outside, threatening the youth inside. The hospital closed the emergency room to the public. The medical professionals stepped back. The medical examiner refused to come to certify the young man’s death. And somehow, the night became mine.
I stood in that room and ushered young people in, two and three at a time, to see their dead friend. I did that for hours. All night long.
I have held a core belief through all 31 years of my ministry at FBCLG: all ministry flows from pastoral care. There is only one institution in the community whose reason to exist is to help people manage every transition of life. From birth through death, and everything in between. The church does not show up for the spectacular moments only. It shows up in emergency rooms at two in the morning when everyone else has left.
As an activist, I had one primary obligation: protest injustice. When agents of the government took innocent lives, I had no choice but to be in the streets. That is what activism requires. But as a pastor, I was called upon far more often to do something different. I was called to sit with mothers who had lost children not to police but to other young people. To stand in hospital rooms. To preach funerals. To help families bury sons.
The criticism that black leaders speak more loudly about police misconduct than about black people killing each other misses this entirely. As an activist, I protested police misconduct because that is what activists do in response to state violence. But as a pastor, I was doing pastoral care for victims of black-on-black violence constantly, and with a frequency that would have surprised the critics. The news media did not always cover what was said or what was done. But the work was being done.
There is also a distinction that matters. An agent of the government taking an innocent life is a state crime. Misguided, misdirected young people killing each other is a community tragedy. Both produce grief. Both require a response. But they are not the same kind of thing, and the responses they demand are not identical.
After that young man’s funeral, we expanded our work with young men in the community. We went on to serve dozens of families whose children became victims of violence. The pastoral care did not end that night. It extended.
The boy’s mother lost her only son. I cannot tell you that anything we did made that loss smaller. But she did not face it alone. That is what I was there to do.