By Chris Hughes

SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— For Christians across the ages, Advent is the season to keep vigil for the light that shines against the world’s deep darkness. In December, one Cooperative BaptistFellowship church shined the light of Advent in a different kind of way by bearing witness to those lost to gun violence.

On a blustery December afternoon on the corner of National Avenue and Grand Street—right in the heart of Springfield, Mo.—a few church members and clergy from the University Heights Baptist Church gathered to hammer 23 stark white crosses into the church lawn. Each cross was emblazoned with a plaque bearing the name and age of one of the 23 homicide victims in the Springfield area in 2023. The crosses remained on the church lawn until Dec. 21—the “longest night”—when many churches hold space for those in their congregation who have lost loved ones.

Among the church members hammering in crosses that day was Bob Reed, who along with his wife first proposed the idea of the crosses to their senior pastor, Rev. Nolan Porter. For Reed, random acts of violence strike too close to home.

“We lost an 18-year-old daughter to murder about 15 years ago,” Reed shared. She was stabbed to death in Nevada in 2009. The horrific tragedy revealed how fortunate the Reeds were to have a network of support. “We had strong family support, we had pastoral support and we were 60 years old and had dealt with death in our families,” Reed explained. “But it was still hard and took quite a while to work through it.”

Since that loss, Reed says they’ve had “a heart for people who have to go through that.”

As Porter tells it, the concept of the crosses on the lawn traces back to Uvalde, Texas, where, on May 24, 2022, a former student of Robb Elementary fatally shot 19 students and two teachers, while injuring 17 others.

It was another random act of violence that struck too close to home for the Baptist pastor. “My school played them in baseball every year from all-stars through high school,” said Porter, whose hometown is close to Uvalde.

For Porter, the Uvalde shooting was another instance where the cycle of media, political and cultural narratives came to the fore. “We say the same things every time there’s a shooting. The news says the same things; we have the same conversations,” he noted. When Porter took to the pulpit soon after, it became a time to imagine what the church could do differently.

“We lamented that event in a sermon on a Sunday morning and we talked about violence and asked the question about what in the world we could do that will make a difference,” Porter remembered. “Yes, we should pray, but what else can we do?”

That’s when the Reeds first approached Porter about using the crosses as a witness to those lost to senseless acts of violence in the community. It was something they first saw another church doing when the couple lived in Kansas City, Mo., at the time of their daughter’s death.

With the idea planted, Porter and the church leadership got to work helping it grow. “We decided about six months ago that we were just going to go with it and just work towards this on the winter solstice,” Porter recalled.

The church decided to pair the idea of a “longest night” service with a memorial to the 23 victims of homicide in Springfield. “It’s the longest night of the year, and it is indicative of these families, these friends, these loved ones who have had one long night of grief after another,” Porter noted. “For all these families that we’re talking about here, they’re also experiencing their first Christmases without this person they love, without this person that’s been there every time before.”

They were intentional about taking a holistic approach. “Whenever there is a homicide, we send a letter from our church family and myself. Along with the letter, we send a little stone of remembrance and then we also try to attend as many of the memorial services as possible as well,” Porter said. The church also invites the grieving families to attend their longest night service in December.

Porter explains it can be difficult to get even basic information when there is a homicide in the community. They’ve been able to make contacts with the police department, particularly with police chaplains, but that doesn’t always work. “When you see it on the news, sometimes there’s a name and sometimes there’s not a name. There’s rarely any information besides the name,” Porter remarked.

It’s the Reeds who do a lot of the grunt work, Porter says. “I think our church’s role is to provide comfort to people who are suffering,” Reed explained.

On the longest night of the year, the congregation of University Heights Baptist Church gathered to hold vigil to the lost. As in other services like it, they sang songs, they prayed, they read scripture and they heard a homily. The church made space for grief, but unlike other such services, they specifically held space for the 23 lives lost to violence in their community. As the service wrapped up, all 23 of their names were read aloud and the families invited to take the cross with their loved one’s name on it.

This act of public witness has given the church the opportunity to share a different kind of Gospel message in the community. “I think it raises awareness of the humanity of people who are murdered,” Reed said.

Porter sees it as an attempt to do something to break the cycle of violence and apathy. “As churches and as pastors, as followers of Jesus, I just didn’t want us to get caught in the repetitive cycle. We should be the last people in the world who do that,” he shared. “People are dying, families are ripped apart. Life is not deemed important when we aren’t bringing to light the fact that so many people lose their lives to violence every single year in big cities and in small towns.”