A Youth With A Mission training (YWAM) center was attacked Saturday night, 2 "missionaries" killed in their beds. These are young people from churches across America who volunteer, get paid nothing, and have to raise from their families, friends, and their home churches the expenses for their mission in foreign nations, primarily 3rd world nations.
Then yesterday morning during worship hours, five people were shot, killing 16 and 18 year old sisters in the "Work" family as they were getting out of their van to go into the church building at New Life Church in Colorado Springs.
Pastor Brady Boyd interviewed on Fox. Reported that:
1. Assailant had enough ammo to kill a hundred people in this large 3,000 member church whose facility covers 30,000 square feet..
2. Amazingly, the church for years has had a plan in place for such an attack, with some 20 volunteers who are trained and armed to defend the church in such an attack.
3. They had heightened the protection yesterday after the YWAM attack. One female member, a former law enforcement officer, had attended early service, and was stationed in forum at center of the church, as security when she heard the shots in the parking lot. She rushed toward the sound of the shots, found the assailant in the hallway of the church, shot him twice, killing him.
TWO ISSUES:
1. A church with armed protection? Isn’t this against command, thou shall not kill, and Christ concerning turning your cheek and loving those who persecute you?
First, the command is not to "murder" rather than "not to kill". It is commanding us humans not to presume to kill an innocent person.
Second, concerning Christ's teachings to turn the cheek, we at times confuse Christ's personal ethics for how we behave with fairly decent persons with whom we have a relationship and social ethics for societies at large. Christ never told Roman soldiers and even centurians, some of he most violent persons who ever lived, that if they became disciples of his they had to quit the Roman army. They only had to refrain from using their position of power to extort money from innocent civilians,
Third, there is no incompatibility between love of a perpetrator and protecting the innocent from the perpetrator by killing him..
When a decent person kills in order to defend innocents, they aren't the ones who made the choice that someone would die today. They only made the choice of who would die once an evil person has decided to kill—the evil person or the innocent person? That is all this woman volunteer did at the church. She didn't initiate killing anyone yesterday. She only responded once the killer began his spree by deciding that since someone was going to die, it should be the perpetrator rather than more innocents.
2. Where is the outcry by the media that this was caused by leftist politicians like Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and John Kerry who constantly engage in hate speech against the "extreme religious right" and "fundamentalists" of all religions?
Church burnings have been increasing for decades. Where is the outcry from congress for an investigation of extremist leftist groups that could be fostering this?
Remember the instant reflex after Oklahoma City bombing to blame the extreme right’s speech, even though the reverse ended up being the truth?