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Note: For more information about ministries with Kids, Guns, and Violence, listen online to a United Methodist teleconference. You can also order a video.
FORT GIBSON, Okla. (UMNS) – God's grace is needed for healing in this community, according to the pastor of the teen-ager who is being held for shooting and wounding five classmates.
"Fort Gibson is a wonderful community," said the Rev. Jeff Burress, pastor of First United Methodist Church. "But during the coming days, with God's help, we are going to pull together even more, and we are going to find better ways to guide young people and people of all ages, so that this will become an even better place to live and to raise a family."
Burress spoke in a Dec. 7 interview in Fort Gibson, a northeast Oklahoma town with less than 4,000 people and at least 20 churches. As he spoke, four children were in hospitals suffering from gunshot wounds they received on the morning of Dec. 6 at Fort Gibson Middle School. A fifth child was recovering at home.
Seth Trickey, 13, was being held in an Oklahoma juvenile detention center in connection with the shooting. The boy and his family are members of First Church, along with several of the school's teachers, the assistant superintendent and the president of the school board.
"The question everyone is asking is why?" Burress said. "Seth is an honor student, he's popular at school, his family is active in our church and community. He turned 13 last Friday and spent the weekend celebrating his birthday. He's a good kid."
The afternoon of the shooting, Burress visited Seth at the courthouse in Muskogee. Reporters asked him how Seth had responded. "All I told them was that he was somber," the pastor said.
The evening of the shooting, First Church hosted a special gathering for students and family members of the community. About 250 people attended.
"We called it a safe service," Burress explained. "We thanked God that nobody was killed, we prayed for the children who were shot and for their families, and we prayed for Seth and his family. Pastors of other churches talked briefly, and so did several public leaders, including the lieutenant governor of Oklahoma."
During his five-minute message, Burress talked about two things, both starting with the letter "G." The first: guilt. The second: grace.
"At a time like this," he said, "it's awfully easy for us to point an accusing finger and to place blame. As Seth's pastor, I can place a lot of guilt on myself. Maybe I could have said or done something that might have prevented this. Seth's dad, his mom, his brother, his sister, his teachers, his Sunday school teacher, his classmates -- all of us could beat ourselves up for something we did or didn't do. But placing blame and feeling guilty isn't what we need to be doing right now. Of course, we need to accept responsibility for what we have done and for what we have failed to do that has caused others to suffer in this instance and in other instances. But laying guilt on ourselves or others isn't the answer. The grace of God is the answer.
"God's grace is great enough to enable us to cope with the worst that can happen and to learn from it. God can bring good from everything, even things that don't make any sense and knock us to our knees. Not only should we accept God's grace for ourselves, we should pass it on to everyone involved."
The safe service featured several prayer hymns and lasted about an hour. Afterward, a period was offered for people to embrace one another and share feelings.
To assist with the ministry in Fort Gibson, the Oklahoma Conference Circle of Care (Children, Youth and Family Ministries) is providing counseling for the children and their parents and conducting training for adults designed to help them minister to emotional and spiritual issues.
Burress said he is grateful for the kind spirit people in the community have toward the Trickey family. "The one message that our church and community have for Seth and his family is 'we love you,' " he said.
"Long after Fort Gibson is out of the headlines, people in our community will need the ministry of care that God can provide through our church," Burress said. "We are not here to explain why bad things happen to good people or why good people do bad things. We are here to help all people -- people who cause violence and people who suffer from violence -- experience God's grace so they can overcome fear and anger and live in peace with hope and love."
During the past year, some faith-based efforts have focused on preventing youth violence. A videotape of a United Methodist-produced teleconference on youth violence, entitled "Kids, Guns, Violence: How to Make a Difference," is available by calling 1-800-251-4091. It is accompanied by a kit that guides viewers through an on-air dialogue among youth, parents, teachers, church leaders, university personnel, and government agencies.
At the end of the teleconference, the panel of featured experts asks the viewers to make a commitment toward making a difference in their community. When the teleconference originally aired in May of this year, hundreds of people nationwide participated. The 90-minute broadcast was uplinked live from the Nashville studios of United Methodist Communications to 600 downlink sites in 48 states plus the Bahamas.
Also available to parents and young people off the FaithHome Web site is a set of booklets to help parents talk to young people about violence and anger management, among other topics. "Saying nothing is exactly the wrong thing for parents to do," said Susan Sally, new ventures director of the United Methodist Publishing House.
The booklets provide practical tips on how to talk to young people about violence and anger, and how to constructively monitor television programming and other media exposure. In addition, two of them -- "Your Child and Violence" and "Your Child and Anger" -- cite relevant Scriptures and contain prayers for peace and for related topics. They also tell parents how to spot the warning signs of violence and how to coordinate nonviolent activities. The eight-page booklets, put together by family therapists and pastors, can be found on the FaithHome Web site (www.faithhome.com) along with other resources.
*Bowdon is the editor of Contact, the newspaper of the Oklahoma Annual Conference. Some information for this story was taken from a Disaster News Network report by Susan Kim.
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