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| Amid Raw Emotions After Shootings, Calls for Healing at Church | |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| DALLAS — After living through a week of racially charged police shootings, a rising tide of boisterous street protests and a growing fear that the nation was locked in a spiral of violence and discord, many Americans took what refuge they could on Sunday in church. | |
| In tiny storefronts and suburban megachurches, they mourned the deaths of five white Dallas police officers at the hands of an African-American sniper who targeted them as they watched over a demonstration against police violence. They also grieved for two African-American men killed in police shootings in Baton Rouge, La., and St. Anthony, Minn. Here are vignettes from four congregations. | |
| At Watermark Community Church in Dallas, members filed into their 4,000-seat auditorium on Sunday morning to the sound of amplified strumming and the crashing of cymbals. Under video projections of a blood-red sky, a man with an acoustic guitar sang: “I will not fear the war, I will not fear the storm. My help is on the way.” | |
| Those who dropped off their children for Sunday school walked by the place where Sgt. Michael J. Smith had stood for years, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes during the week, near the glass doors that lead to the preschool classrooms. | Those who dropped off their children for Sunday school walked by the place where Sgt. Michael J. Smith had stood for years, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes during the week, near the glass doors that lead to the preschool classrooms. |
| He was there the previous Sunday, but not on this one. On Thursday night, Sergeant Smith, 55, was one of five Dallas police officers killed by Micah Johnson, a black man who said he was looking to kill white police officers. | |
| There was a rawness here for those who knew Sergeant Smith and mourned his death. But at Watermark, a nondenominational megachurch set among office buildings and the multilane whoosh of Interstate 635, the senior pastor, Todd Wagner, also used Sunday as a time to call for spiritual renewal and racial healing to his flock of thousands. | There was a rawness here for those who knew Sergeant Smith and mourned his death. But at Watermark, a nondenominational megachurch set among office buildings and the multilane whoosh of Interstate 635, the senior pastor, Todd Wagner, also used Sunday as a time to call for spiritual renewal and racial healing to his flock of thousands. |
| “The very first time I heard ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I was like: ‘What? Why would you make such a racist statement?’” Mr. Wagner, who is white, said during an impassioned sermon. He realized later, he said, that he needed to listen to those who had been making the declaration and try to understand the source of their hurt, love them and preach the Gospel. | “The very first time I heard ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I was like: ‘What? Why would you make such a racist statement?’” Mr. Wagner, who is white, said during an impassioned sermon. He realized later, he said, that he needed to listen to those who had been making the declaration and try to understand the source of their hurt, love them and preach the Gospel. |
| Others, he said, would be wise to do the same — to respond to the Black Lives Matter call with “let me understand your pain,” and to show “that white men do care.” | |
| Most of the people who came to Watermark on Sunday were white, but the church embraces multiculturalism, offering headphones for Spanish translation and a huge map in the central atrium that shows the more than 70 countries where church members are engaged in ministry. | Most of the people who came to Watermark on Sunday were white, but the church embraces multiculturalism, offering headphones for Spanish translation and a huge map in the central atrium that shows the more than 70 countries where church members are engaged in ministry. |
| As many as 12,000 people can come for weekend services at the Dallas campus, one of three North Texas locations, so not everyone knew Sergeant Smith. But there were some who did. Wes Butler, 39, the director of family and children’s ministry, said Sergeant Smith, one of a number of off-duty officers hired by the church, had become a church member. He would sometimes welcome newcomers in uniform. | |
| “He would show people around and say: ‘Let me tell you about this place. Your kids are going to love it — you’re going to love it,’” Mr. Butler recalled. Sometimes, he said, Sergeant Smith would delight children by turning on the lights atop his squad car. | “He would show people around and say: ‘Let me tell you about this place. Your kids are going to love it — you’re going to love it,’” Mr. Butler recalled. Sometimes, he said, Sergeant Smith would delight children by turning on the lights atop his squad car. |
| On Sunday, the church printed a handout with a “Message From Todd,” the pastor. It was reprint of a letter to Dallas residents that he had posted online the night of the shooting. | On Sunday, the church printed a handout with a “Message From Todd,” the pastor. It was reprint of a letter to Dallas residents that he had posted online the night of the shooting. |
| The city, Mr. Wagner wrote, was “a war zone.” | The city, Mr. Wagner wrote, was “a war zone.” |
| “As part of that war, darkness has been growing in our country because for some time leaders and citizens alike have mocked” the light of God, he wrote. | “As part of that war, darkness has been growing in our country because for some time leaders and citizens alike have mocked” the light of God, he wrote. |
| Onstage Sunday, Mr. Wagner, wearing an untucked dress shirt and jeans, reiterated that theme. He said there was “no justification” for what the gunman had done. The attack represented, Mr. Wagner said, the “anger of man,” which is flawed, and he contrasted it with the wrath of God, always righteous. He praised Sergeant Smith for knowing that the best way to love people was to serve people. | |
| Behind the pastor, for a time, the video screens showed a photograph of the city’s skyline at night, with the words “Pray for Dallas.” The city, he said, is going to teach people how to communicate, love and heal. | Behind the pastor, for a time, the video screens showed a photograph of the city’s skyline at night, with the words “Pray for Dallas.” The city, he said, is going to teach people how to communicate, love and heal. |
| “If they’re looking for a race war, they’re not going to find it in Dallas, Texas,” he said, to applause. | “If they’re looking for a race war, they’re not going to find it in Dallas, Texas,” he said, to applause. |
| He asked the congregation to gather in small groups, turn over the flier in which his letter was printed and read five prayers printed there. Behind the huge soundboard, a young man in a black T-shirt, a young woman in sandals and an older man in shorts took turns. | |
| They prayed for the church to be a light, and for those who had lost loved ones. The older man read a prayer asking that their hearts might be rid of racism and prejudice, but he also deviated from the script and told God that the nation faced “the potential of anarchy.” | They prayed for the church to be a light, and for those who had lost loved ones. The older man read a prayer asking that their hearts might be rid of racism and prejudice, but he also deviated from the script and told God that the nation faced “the potential of anarchy.” |
| When it was the young woman’s turn to pray for the church as it mourned the death of “our friend,” she could not. Her throat was choked with tears. | When it was the young woman’s turn to pray for the church as it mourned the death of “our friend,” she could not. Her throat was choked with tears. |
| BATON ROUGE, La. — The big churches, the century-old ones with the spacious sanctuaries, have become headquarters in Baton Rouge this week. Organizations have held meetings in the pews and leaders demanding justice have held news conferences below the stained-glass windows. | |
| The Ark of Safety is not a big church. | |
| It sits in the corner of a strip mall once anchored by a Piggly Wiggly, which has closed, and fronted by a weed-strewn and vacant parking lot. The dollar store, clothing store and beauty supply store, all dark and quiet on Sunday morning, are advertised by signs on hanging banners and protected behind their display glass by metal bars. | |
| The Ark of Safety was started in the corner unit here nine years ago by the Rev. Carl Williams, a businessman, a clergyman and a childhood friend of Alton Sterling, the man killed by the police here last week. The Sterlings — Alton Sterling’s aunts particularly — are close family friends of Mr. Williams’s family. They have been regular churchgoers here, he said, one aunt sitting in as recently as last week. | |
| But this Sunday, they were not among the 20 or so in the church’s simple sanctuary, with its yellow cinderblock wall, artificial plants, buzzing fluorescent lights and acoustic ceiling tiles. This was not a headquarters of political protest, of “fussiness,” as Mr. Williams said. | |
| “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, this is about the Word” Mr. Williams said. He did not care for worldly politics. He was not pro-black or white, he added. He was pro-soul. | |
| “We have so much to be thankful” for began the pastor, the Rev. Tommy Gordon who took over from Mr. Williams, his brother in law, about three years ago. Mr. Gordon’s sermon, as it began, was not explicitly about what one young churchgoer called the “horrible week.” But as the sermon unfolded, the week kept returning. | |
| “Things going on in Baton Rouge and elsewhere are difficult,” Mr. Gordon said, leaving his pulpit and pacing to the “Amen”s of the small congregation. “Because we’re looking to Man. You have to give it to God.” | |
| The message was straightforward. Trust in the world and you will be lost. Try to accommodate with the world and you will be lost. Demand justice from the world and you will be lost. | |
| “When things are going wrong, people always want to shout about it,” he said. “Nobody’s going to listen. This is the time to get on your knees and pray.” | |
| There is nothing wrong with lawful protest, he said. But, he added more than once: “I’ve never seen Jesus at a protest,” he said. | |
| This was a hard message, he acknowledged afterward, particularly for people with long connections to the Sterling family. But it is what the Scripture teaches: Let God handle it. | |
| Colby Chenier, a thin 24-year-old in a Houston Texans knit cap, whom Mr. Gordon prayed over at the end of the service, was conflicted about this message. His friends had been out protesting, and there is a side of him, too, he said, that wanted to be out there. The recent deaths of two people close to him, both “from gunshots,” had caused him to think more acutely about what he was doing with his life. “I got a little girl,” Mr. Chenier said. “I need to try and get myself situated.” | |
| Brandon Lee, 22, who knew Mr. Sterling and whose father bought CDs from him, also expressed a belief that did not exactly echo the message of the service, which Mr. Lee had taken part in by playing guitar and singing a solo. | |
| “I just really feel like it starts with Man,” he said, speaking of the need for justice. “If you fix Man you fix the world.” But Mr. Lee said that his faith has offered a key measure of comfort about Mr. Sterling’s death, no matter if the criminal justice system and the world let him down. “Suffering is in this world,” he said. “At the end of the day he no longer has to suffer.” CAMPBELL ROBERTSON | |
| ST. ANTHONY, Minn. — When a burglar alarm sounded in the middle of the night at Nativity Lutheran Church, Officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony Police once walked the halls with the pastor to check for intruders. | |
| But on Sunday morning, a drawing of a broken heart adorned the cover of the bulletin at Nativity, and much of the sermon focused on Officer Yanez’s fatal shooting last week of an African-American motorist, Philando Castile, and the mournful uncertainty that has swept through this region in recent days. | |
| “I want to pull on something that I can make a change with,” the Rev. Glenn Seefeldt said in his sermon, in which he called for prayers for both Mr. Castile’s family and Officer Yanez. “We want to be able to be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem. But where do we start?” | |
| Nativity, a mostly white congregation located directly across the street from the St. Anthony Police Department, finds itself at the uncomfortable center of a national debate on policing and race. Members said on Sunday that they were balancing sadness about Mr. Castile’s death with questions about what exactly happened during that fatal traffic stop, and uncertainty about what they could and should do next. | |
| “We’re all shocked and we’re all deeply saddened,” Keith Setterholm said after the service. Mr. Setterholm said he lives just a few blocks from where Mr. Castile was killed in the nearby suburb of Falcon Heights, which is patrolled by St. Anthony officers. “You don’t expect something like this to happen in your neighborhood, especially, though we’re certainly aware racial profiling can happen any place, anytime.” | |
| Protesters occupied the area outside the governor’s mansion shortly after Mr. Castile’s death, and have since marched repeatedly. Though most demonstrations have been entirely peaceful, a protest on Saturday night turned tense after protesters blocked an interstate, which led to dozens of arrests and injuries to officers. Another protest was planned for Sunday afternoon outside the St. Anthony police station. | |
| Across the street at Nativity, some members wrote letters of support to Mr. Castile’s family and to Officer Yanez on stationery provided by the church. Others met in a small group with Pastor Seefeldt to discuss their questions about the recent news, or chatted about the events over coffee in the lobby. | |
| “We should speak out in support of police, in support of African-Americans,” said Ed Spenny, 81, a longtime member and former Sunday school teacher. “We still have a lot of racism in our society. I think the church should play a role here.” | |
| Michelle Gustafson, a social worker who belongs to Nativity, said that she had worked to digest news of Mr. Castile’s death in recent days and struggled to reconcile it with her own perceptions of life here. | |
| “I think the defensive side of me wants me to think that was kind of an isolated incident,” Ms. Gustafson said, “because that’s not my experience of what Minnesota is.” | |
| From the pulpit on Sunday, Pastor Seefeldt mentioned “white privilege” and urged members to think deeply about their own actions and hidden biases. | |
| “I have a real and tremendous guilt response,” he told worshipers. “What have I done to contribute to racism as a white male?” | |
| In an interview, Pastor Seefeldt described his congregation, which has about 1,800 members and which he has pastored for more than 30 years, as “pretty classic middle-class progressive” and deeply engaged in mission work and community outreach. | |
| “From a rather quiet, unassuming village to suddenly being under the national spotlight, there’s some sense of violation,” said Pastor Seefeldt, who lives in St. Anthony near the church. “I think there are some who want to run and hide. There are others who are not happy, who are very saddened by the shooting, but are eager to use the energy” and engage in social change. MITCH SMITH | |
| DALLAS — Standing before hundreds of worshipers, the Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III said he was not interested in preaching a message of reconciliation without change, or of healing if that simply meant patching over the injustice that had led to the killings of two black men by police last week, and scores of others over the past several years. | |
| “We can’t have normal church today,” Dr. Haynes said, adding that he was tired of delivering service after service after such tragedies and naming the victims Tamir Rice, Walter Scott and Eric Garner. “You won’t have unity as long as you have structured injustice,” he said. “There is no peace until we have justice.” | |
| He added, “The Bible says injustice is a sin. The Bible says oppression is a sin.” | |
| The church, whose congregants are overwhelmingly black, sits on the outskirts of South Dallas. Large portraits of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X adorn its halls, along with paintings of President Obama and a black Jesus. | |
| With a wooden ankh, a looped cross, hanging behind him in the sanctuary, Dr. Haynes delivered a fiery speech that captured the grief and anger that many black Americans have felt as they protest the deaths of black men at the hands of law enforcement, even as they mourn the ambush of police officers in Dallas, which left five dead. | |
| Dr. Haynes’s daughter was at the protest rally on Thursday night, and was video chatting with him from her phone when the shooting broke out. The pastor, who said he watched his daughter’s proud smile transform into screams, struck out at those attempting to blame the Black Lives Matter protest movement for the shootings, calling the accusations “racist gall.” | |
| “That was a peaceful march,” he said. There are “five dead officers, that’s horrible. Alton Sterling is dead. That’s horrible.” | |
| Dr. Haynes called out the government for not providing returning veterans with adequate mental health care. He criticized black churches for their “sin of silence” in the face of police brutality, and white churches for “blindness by privilege.” | |
| During the service, Dr. Haynes invited to the altar congregants who had been involved in the protests, those whose loved ones work in law enforcement, and children. | |
| After a prayer, Rose Tolbert, 58, walked back to her seat, tears streaming down her face. She works in law enforcement here, and is the mother of six sons, two of whom are also in law enforcement. | |
| A longtime congregant, Ms. Tolbert said had to come to church on Sunday because the last week had left her empty. “I was in tears on the way here today,” she said, her voice breaking. She paused, and then collapsed against a pole in the church lobby, sobbing. | |
| “I came here to get refilled,” she said. “We need to pray and get active. We need to stand up.” NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES |