Pastor's Preface

This morning, before the sun rose, I heard the kind of sound no family should ever hear — the breaking, trembling sobs of a child grieving another child. A sixteen-year-old Black boy, a former classmate of my granddaughter while living in Philadelphia, gone by violence. More potential buried. More promise stolen. More trauma handed down like unwanted inheritance.

As your pastor, I cannot pretend this is normal.

As a church, we cannot treat this as routine.

As a community, we dare not grow numb.

What follows is my reflection — born in the quiet ache of dawn, shaped by Scripture, and written with the full weight of pastoral love and prophetic duty. I offer it to you not as opinion, but as lament… and as a call for us to stand together in truth, tenderness, and holy resistance.

May God meet us in the mourning.

May God strengthen us in the rising.

May God protect our children — all of them, every one.

— Pastor Golden

I. The Sound No Family Should Know

For the second—maybe even the third—time in this young school year, I woke to the sound every grandparent fears and no grandparent should ever normalize: the shaking, heaving sobs of my 17-year-old granddaughter. Her classmate—another child, another Black boy—was gone. Violently. Senselessly. Sixteen years old.

Sixteen!

We say the number, but we don’t feel the weight anymore.

We grieve, but we do not rage. 

No, for we have gone too gentle into that dark goodnight.

We mourn, but we dare not shout.

We’ve lived inside the siren so long that the alarm has become ambience. Our compassion has grown calloused. Our holy outrage—our Jesus-shaped tenderness—has been trained out of us. We fear that if we cry too loud or lament too long, somebody will tell us we’re too emotional, too fragile, too angry, or somehow complicit in the very pain we are forced to endure.

And so the tears of our children fall into a culture that has grown accustomed to tragedy.

II. The Curse We Don’t Name

A generational curse takes shape.

Not the superstition of pulpits and paperback theology,

but the lived reality where our youth inherit trauma instead of legacy,

funerals instead of futures.

We should be passing down wealth.

We should be passing down wisdom.

We should be passing down story, vision, and possibility.

But too often we pass down fear, vigilance, and the emotional exhaustion of trying to survive a world that refuses to see our children as anything more than suspects. Targets. Threats.

That is the curse.

The curse is the inheritance.

III. Wounds Turned Inward

And when I look at the internecine wounds we inflict on ourselves—the harm within the village—I can only describe our precision as tragic mastery. We hunt one another with the fatal focus of a lion stalking its prey. Trauma has turned inward, and the wound festers in the mirror.

And where is the Church?

This very institution that I am part of—and will continue to be shaped by—

Where is our sacred disruption?

Where is our righteous cry?

“Is not the LORD in Zion?

Is not her King within her?” (Jeremiah 8:19ff)

Today, we have multimillion-dollar rappers, multimillion-dollar athletes, multimillion-dollar influencers—and now even multimillion-dollar clergy. But we seem powerless to heal the hemorrhage of our own neighborhoods. Helpless to stanch the bloodshed. Distracted by the trivial while our children bleed out on the pavement.

We have traded the work of liberation for the policing of women’s clothing.

We major in minors and minor in miracles.

V. Damn the dress.

And so let me say it plainly:

Damn the dress.

I don’t care if she steps out like Lady Godiva herself.

Her dignity does not rise or fall on the length of her hemline.

Her worth is not measured in cotton or polyester.

What matters  is whether her fierceness is fixed on something higher than notoriety. And what matters even more is whether we have the courage to confront what is killing our children, rather than fixate on what is covering (or not covering) their bodies.

VI. Remove the Blinders

Let a nation of tailors—call them Tom, the peeping ones who have eyes but do not see—finally pick up their shears and cut away the blinders from our own hearts. Let us remove the fabric of denial. Let us refuse to stitch one more garment of distraction while the headlines repeat themselves in the blood of our sons.

Because I cannot wake up to another cry like the one I heard this morning.

I cannot watch another young life fall into the ground uncelebrated.

I cannot bear another sixteen-year-old funeral.

And neither can you.

VII. If the Lord Is in Zion…

If the Lord is in Zion,

then Zion must rise.

If the King is within her,

then the people must stand.

Not tomorrow.

Not when the news cycle shifts.

Not after the next vigil.

Now.

While the cry is still in the air.

While the tears are still warm.

While the Spirit is still groaning.

Now.