“I just don’t want to be part of another group that spends all its time talking, and nothing changes,” one woman said, a veteran of the neighborhood’s safety committee. “I’m here because I have grandbabies the age of that boy,” said another, referring to the death of a Chicago teen, Derrion Albert.

His death brought national attention to the problem of youth violence. The boy, an honor roll student, was walking home from school when he got sucked into a street brawl in a nearby neighborhood. He was struck in the back of the head, pummeled, and beaten to death. He was the third teenager from Chicago to be killed since the beginning of the school year, and the month of September wasn’t over yet.

Parents and teachers started asking for help from organi-zations and institutions throughout the city. As a pastor of a church located in the community, I was invited to attend a safety committee meeting organized by a local neighborhood association. They were calling on us to strengthen our networks with one another to keep the children in our neighborhood from being the next victims of this terrifying wave of violence.

Where’s the outcry?
Inside the church, members were asking hard questions about the complacency of everyday people that had allowed the situation to become so deadly for children in our city. One person in our Café group (a cluster of young women who meet weekly in each other’s homes for prayer, conversation and study) shared something she’d written in her journal about the tragedy: “Why were we not outraged when students from one poor and isolated neighborhood were forced to take buses to another poor and isolated neighborhood, where they did not feel safe, in order to receive as basic an entitlement as a high school education? Why are we not outraged that the buses and trains that serve our city clearly serve some areas better than others—the areas with money, not necessarily the ones with more people needing transportation?”

Like the parents and teachers who gathered at the safety committee meeting, the women in our Café group were asking for help to stay engaged and find a sense of hope for the future rooted in something deeper than simple optimism. They were looking for hope in a situation others had deemed hopeless. To maintain that kind of hope, they needed to be able to identify the spiritual resources that would sustain them. (Continued on next page.)