Downtown Allentown Church Will Not Cower Before Murder in Its Backyard

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.

This murder has hit close to home. Not only was Jameel Clark brutally killed right next to church property, but he lived in the same apartment building as the church’s rector, The Rev. Patrick Malloy. Malloy did not know the man, but he remembered him as someone who stood out for his polite demeanor when passing him in the lobby of their building, an experience Malloy described in an op-ed submitted to and scheduled for publication by the Morning Call this week. In his op-ed, Malloy writes, “Jameel’s death is a tragedy. But the real tragedy is that we find ourselves in a society where it is not unusual for people to consider human life worth so little. The murder that was committed behind our church on Sunday is a symptom of a terrible disease. People who so easily devalue someone else’s life must not place much value on their own.”

[Find complete op-ed, On Facing Evil in a Dark Downtown Parking Lot, here.]

The people of Grace Church will focus on the dignity of human life on this coming Sunday, but fostering human dignity is always at the heart of life at Grace Church. The congregation has a long and distinguished history of providing people with hope and support in the midst of what has become an almost forgotten neighborhood. Through its food pantry; job counseling service; its Montessori school that provides scholarships to children of poor families; the GED program, juvenile offender program, and the legal services program housed in the church’s administrative wing; and through the AIDS Outreach services provided for many years, the church has worked to make a difference in the lives of its neighbors. The members of Grace have chosen to stay in the city when so many others have left for safer places, greener pastures.

They want the people of the downtown neighborhoods to know they believe that their lives are valuable. Their hope is that this service will spread the word that the people of Grace Episcopal Church are there to stay and that they believe that when people stand together, they can make a difference, a difference even in the lives of young men like Jameel Clark. Everyone is welcome to join with them on Sunday morning in their effort to take back the streets from the chaos and evil that now rule.

For more information, contact: Libby House, Senior Warden, Grace Episcopal Church (610-291-9260; [email protected])