Five people have been killed within 500 feet of the church
was in our monthly deacon meeting on Zoom when a member informed me that yet another shooting had occurred at my church, New Northside Missionary Baptist Church. As I rushed up to the church building from the Family Life Center, it was déjà vu all over again. Not 10 days earlier, we saw the strips of yellow tape, multiple police vehicles, the large presence of officers and investigators from St. Louis City and County police departments, spectators and grieving family members. Ten days earlier, two young men’s last ride alive ended at the base of the traffic signal directly in front of the church. One died behind the wheel and the other a few streets away.
Yet that night, it was a mother, Diesha Boyd, 34, shot in the head with her children witnessing the terror while also being wounded. I watched the video footage with horror as I witnessed the coolness and deliberation with which the shooters in an adjacent vehicle had plenty of time to determine children were in Ms. Boyd’s vehicle. They fired anyway, and they drove away in no great hurry, just as you would anytime a light changes from red to green. After the shots, the daycare center van Ms. Boyd was driving slowly crossed the intersection and rolled to a stop at the rear of our north parking lot, with her deceased behind the wheel. The shooters were not white nationalist nor Klansman. They were not police officers. They were men and Black like me.
I prayed that night in the church, lit only by the dim glow of exit lighting and the strobing flashes of the police vehicles. I remembered that the shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35: Jesus wept. Jesus met humanity amid their sorrow by joining in grief, by praying and by doing something beyond the prayer by raising Lazarus up. Five people have been killed within 500 feet of the front doors of church, and we decided more prayer was needed, and we needed to act beyond praying.
On April 22, we invited the 27th Ward Clergy Partnership, the Jennings Clergy Coalition and North Pointe neighborhood residents to join us in memorializing Diesha Boyd and the other victims killed near the church. We were joined by a strong District 6 St. Louis Police presence along with a few distant relatives of the Boyd family as well as James Clark and the Urban League’s Walnut Park Cure Violence de-escalation team. We lamented the loss of life, we prayed and we paused to honor the departed, but we had to go beyond the praying, and we did.
We committed to 30 days of prayer around the same time of Diesha’s death every night at 7 p.m. We reached beyond the Northpointe neighborhood, the 27th Ward and North St. Louis to the local interfaith community by requesting that the 33 representative faith groups take the time to send a response to the human tragedy that occurred in front of New Northside Missionary Baptist Church. They responded by sending condolences including the faces of their leaders – faces that do not look like Diesha Boyd or myself – but that share the grief along with the family and our community where such a tragedy took place.
We also went beyond praying to our state capital to join the Ecumenical Leadership Council and The St. Louis Metropolitan Clergy Coalition in advocating for urgent legislation to address gun availability in our city.