Key points
- United Methodist bishops call for prayers and actions for peace following a school shooting and the assassination of activist Charlie Kirk.
- They wrote as people across the political spectrum debate the legacy of Kirk, whose death follows a growing number of politically motivated acts of violence.
- The bishops roundly condemned violence in all its forms and urged churchgoers to emulate Jesus.
After a day that saw a school shooting in Colorado and an assassination in Utah, United Methodist bishops across the U.S. are calling for the faithful to be peacemakers.
“As United Methodists gather for worship over the next several days, we call you to prayer and meaningful action against violence as a means of dispute settlement,” Council of Bishops President Tracy S. Malone said in a statement on the bishops’ behalf. Malone also leads the Indiana Conference.
“We urge United Methodists to actively promote a culture of understanding, respect and nonviolent conflict resolution,” she wrote.
Malone and other bishops are encouraging the pursuit of peace as they see both political violence and school shootings on the rise.
On Sept. 10, a shooter took the life of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Authorities announced Sept. 12 that a 22-year-old Utah man is in custody in connection with the shooting.
Just minutes after Kirk was shot, a 16-year-old shot and critically injured two fellow students before killing himself at the local high school in Evergreen, Colorado. The local sheriff’s office says the high school shooter was “radicalized by some extremist network,” and the Denver Post found that he espoused white supremacist views online.
Nearby, Evergreen United Methodist Church immediately mobilized to provide care for the traumatized school community. The high school is located in the same Colorado county where two students’ massacre at Columbine High School in 1999 eventually led to the deaths of 14 people.
The shootings — both on school campuses — came just a couple of weeks after United Methodists around the U.S. joined in mourning the victims of a mass shooting at a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis.
“Among developed nations, the U.S. is an outlier with extremely high incidence of homicide and gun violence,” Mountain Sky Conference Bishop Kristin Stoneking said in a statement shortly after the two shootings. Her area encompasses United Methodist churches in Montana, Wyoming, a part of Idaho as well as Colorado and Utah.
“Violence has become the air we breathe and the water we are swimming in. As a collective, we have become too accustomed to it, until it hits personally,” she wrote. “But the truth is that all of this is personal. As a human community, violence that affects one of us affects all of us.”
She and other bishops wrote as many across the U.S. political spectrum are wrestling with the legacy of Kirk, who died at the age of 31. The co-founder of Turning Point USA capably organized and drew the admiration of young Christian conservative evangelicals, especially young men. He was a husband, father and cherished ally of President Trump, who called for U.S. flags to be at half-staff in Kirk’s honor until the evening of Sept. 14.
Kirk also was a well-known provocateur, who directed hateful rhetoric toward LGBTQ people, as well as racial and ethnic minorities. He denounced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He stirred fears that immigrants were replacing white Americans. In the wake of a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, he said it was worth the cost of some gun deaths to preserve Second Amendment rights. At the time he was shot, he was addressing a question about gun violence.
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United Methodist bishops, as well as both Democratic and Republican leaders, unequivocally condemned the assassination and offered prayers of comfort for his loved ones.
“We will not shift this culture of violence with more violence,” Stoneking said. Jesus chose another way, she noted, even when facing a brutal death at the hands of Roman authorities.
“Just before the violence of this world overtook him, Jesus said, ‘Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword,’” she wrote, quoting Matthew 26:52. “This violence is not our way.”
Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, who leads the Holston and West Virginia conferences in Appalachia, said in addition to rejecting violence, United Methodists must actively choose love, civility and compassion.
“Our world does not need more voices that inflame anger or deepen division,” she wrote in a statement. “It needs Christians who embody Christ’s reconciling love in the public square as well as in our private lives.”
Kirk’s death appears to be the latest in politically motivated violence in the U.S. These include:
- An attack on workers at the Centers for Disease Control that resulted in the death of an Atlanta police officer.
- The killing of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another and his wife in Minnesota.
- The firebombing of the Democratic Pennsylvania governor’s residence.
- The fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.
- The killing of United Health Care’s chief executive officer.
- Attacks on an Arizona campaign office of then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
- Last year’s two assassination attempts on Trump.
“This has to stop,” California-Pacific Conference Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank wrote succinctly. “Violence is never the answer. One of our basic commands and guides for living in community is ‘Thou shall not murder.’”
This week’s shootings also come as the U.S. marks the 24th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“There is no rationalization that can ever legitimize the terror we are inflicting upon one another as human beings,” wrote Bishop Laura Merrill on Facebook. She leads the Arkansas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma Missionary conferences.
She noted that the latest acts of brutality come as the military is being used to police U.S. civilians, as civilians in Ukraine and Gaza are under attack and as masked federal agents have been given license to detain people based on how they look, talk and make a living.
“We must pray, remembering that the true purpose of prayer is never to change God’s heart, but to change our own,” she wrote. “We must listen and learn, to try to understand across the breach. … We must move, to put ourselves next to the vulnerable ones who always end up at the bottom of these heaps. And we must speak in courageous ways that build up love and community.”
United Methodists must do more than speak out, said Bishop Héctor A. Burgos Núñez, who leads the Upper New York and Susquehanna conferences.
“These are days for the church to be seen — proclaiming the gospel with boldness, being Christ’s love in action, and standing shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors in every place,” he wrote in a statement. “That is the path I choose. That is the witness I will bear.”
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling, who leads the Baltimore-Washington and Peninsula-Delaware conferences, has been helping United Methodists in her area nonviolently continue ministry and protect the vulnerable as armed troops and agents patrol their neighborhoods.
“We must understand and hold sacrosanct that we belong to one another,” she said in a statement. “Our obligations transcend ideology. Let us continue to commit ourselves to a path of peace, where disagreement does not lead to death, and where the beloved community, which demands mutual respect and the protection of basic human rights, is not a dream, but a reality we live into each day.”
The United Methodist Church came into being at a similarly tumultuous time under the shadow of political assassinations and the Vietnam conflict. The Uniting Conference where the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren churches officially became one, took place just 19 days after the murder of King.
“The birth of The United Methodist Church in April 1968, just days after Dr. King’s assassination, reminds us that unity in the midst of crisis can itself be a radical witness,” said Ashley Boggan, a noted church historian and top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History.
“When the world felt fractured along racial, political and moral lines, United Methodists understood that reconciliation required more than statements — it demanded visible action: vigils in the streets, partnerships with civil rights leaders and advocacy for peace so that the church’s witness was as present in the public square as it was in the pulpit.”
Today, she said, United Methodists are once again called to come together and stand boldly both within and outside church walls “as a people committed to justice, peace and the sacred worth of every life.”
Stoneking invited United Methodists to pray to God to guide their steps toward a country and world where schools are truly safe places of learning.
She also asked for prayers for a time when “churches hold an evening service for daily vespers not in response to the pain of violence and loss” and “we hold one another with the dignity and care with which God holds each of us.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 of newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
