As City Reels from 13th Homicide of the Year
Downtown Allentown Church Will Not Cower Before Murder in Its Backyard
By Libby House, senior warden, Grace Allentown
Allentown, Pennsylvania… This coming Sunday morning, on August 24th at 10 o’clock, the people of Grace Episcopal Church, at the corner of 5th and Linden in the center of Allentown, will stand together against the hopelessness, chaos, evil, and darkness that fill their streets. Once again the people of Center City Allentown have suffered a senseless homicide, the thirteenth this year, and the people of Grace Church will not remain silent. Instead they will stand up from their pews and move into the place where this tragic loss of a valuable human life occurred, into the streets. They will confront the violence head on.
On Sunday, August 10, Jameel Clark, twenty years old, a man not much more than a boy, was murdered on the parking lot behind a building owned by the church, which until very recently had housed the church’s AIDS ministry for more than a decade. The people of Grace Church, in an endeavor to stand in solidarity with the good people of their neighborhood, the true victims of the senseless mayhem, will process from their church to the very spot on the bleak, macadam, parking lot where the killing took place. There they will pray for Jameel and others who have died violently in this city, read God’s Word, and recommit themselves to holding out a corner of grace in a troubled neighborhood.
The lot where Jameel was gunned down is the same lot where they build the bonfire each Easter for their Vigil. On Sunday, they will go back to that spot. They will carry with them the fire from Easter night, a sign that the darkness has not and cannot extinguish God’s light burning in the world. And, just as at the Easter Vigil, they will light individual candles and move back into the church. They will proclaim again that Christ is the Light of the World, and they will recommit themselves to letting the Light spread through them into Center City Allentown.
