Last week I shared about two traditions at Living Water that bring us together as a community. This week I’m going to focus on a practice that engages the community around us.

A month ago, on June 19, a man named Anthony Morgan was walking along Pratt Avenue four blocks from our church when he saw a police car and took off running. Anthony, a self-confessed member of the Gangster disciples, was on parole at the time on on a weapons charge and apparently decided that he didn’t want to be seen by the police. Unfortunately for him the police had already spotted him and one of the officers chased him on foot. Anthony pulled out the gun he was carrying and shot at the police. They returned fire and killed him on the sidewalk only half a block from where my wife and I used to live.

Though other shootings have taken place since we’ve moved to the area, this was the first one that happened in an area familiar to us. It brought the reality of violence closer to home and challenged me to think about how we as a community respond.

One of the way Rogers Park traditionally responds to shooting deaths is a vigil organized by CeaseFire, a Chicago-wide anti-gun violence organization. The complication in this case was that the killing was carried out by the police who are a regular ally of CeaseFire in gun buy-backs and other events and so it was not politically expedient for them to organize the vigil. So Sally Youngquist, pastor at Living Water, took responsibility for organizing the vigil and wrote a liturgy for us to read together.

Not everyone in the neighborhood was supportive. One blogger in the neighborhood announced the event with the headline entitled “Pathetic Candlelight Vigil Tonight”. He had written about the incident earlier in the week with the headline “Shooting on Pratt: Getting Rid of the Gunk”. The gentleman attended the vigil, and videotaped it.

Afterward the vigil, I and other Living Water members who knew his blog greeted him in a loving and friendly way. I’d like to say that our friendliness and warmth won him over, but the following day our friend the video blogger posted his video of the vigil on YouTube with captions and editing mocking those of us who were praying.

For me, praying for the both the gangster and the blogger are at the core of what it means to be the church in an economically diverse neighborhood like Rogers Park. Living Water is called to pray for the gangster who our neighbor see as less then human. And at the same time we are called to engage our neighbor and pray for their transformation. It will not always be easy and we will not always see the results we would like to. But nonetheless, let us pray for peace and act for peace.

P.S. I would be remiss if I didn’t include a link to this much more positive and hopeful report on our vigil from another neighbor who participated.