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Every Sunday for the past nine years, members of the Landisville (Pa.) Mennonite Church have prayed for a son of their congregation. Every month they send him a small sum of money, and every month some of them visit him.

Prayer, money, and visits: fairly typical examples of congregational caregiving, one might suppose. What's atypical is that nine years ago, after a meal with relatives on a calm Sunday afternoon, 14-year-old Keith Weaver killed his parents, Clair and Anna May, and his sister, Kimberly. The inexplicable horror of the crime and the loss of lives rocked the Weavers' family, church, and community to the core.

In the middle of their grief and disillusionment, however, members of the Landisville congregation got busy. They helped clean the house where the murders occurred, established a legal support committee to care for Keith's needs so that the surviving brother and sister wouldn't have to, and founded a "seventy times seven" fund to collect money for his expenses. They studied grief, forgiveness, and victimization in Sunday school and sermons, calling on the expertise of area chaplains and counselors. A year after the tragedy, they held a memorial service to lament the loss of their loved ones and to recommit themselves to the journey of forgiveness.

These days they are continuing that journey, through prayers and financial help and visits to Keith in prison.

"Forgiveness is an act of God's grace," says Landisville pastor Sam Thomas. "You don't forgive and forget; you forgive again and again and again."

This story is one of many included in God and the Victim, a recently released collection of essays. The chapter authors—a zesty mix of theologians, pastors, and counselors—examine topics of evil, victimization, justice, and forgiveness with psychological and spiritual insight. By invoking the stories of Cain and Abel, Job, and the Good Samaritan, the writers for the most part abandon conventional understandings of crime and move us toward more compassionate and complex responses. They refute several myths in both church and society: that crime results exclusively from offenders' social environment or free will; that offenders' actions are primarily wrongs against the state; that victims need to simply forgive, forget, and move on with their lives.

God and the Victim is the result of a 1997 theological forum on crime victims and the church, sponsored by Neighbors Who Care (NWC), the crime-victim branch of Prison Fellowship Ministries. Part of a trend of Christian responses to people affected by crime, this book asserts that the spiritual dimension of crime is frequently ignored. While the church has discovered ways to care for offenders, such as prison ministries and halfway houses, it is only now coming to terms with its responsibility to reach out to victims, says Lisa Barnes Lampman, executive director of NWC. According to one survey, crime victims turn to the faith community for assistance five times more often than to governmental and social services. And with more than 43 million people becoming victims of crime per year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, NWC says the church cannot afford to remain silent.

A parallel development to crime-victim ministries like NWC is the burgeoning of victim-offender conferencing (VOC) programs across the country (also called victim-offender reconciliation programs). Churches are becoming increasingly involved in establishing VOC in their communities, moving the number of such programs in the U.S. from only a handful in the 1970s to approximately 250 today. These programs, operating out of a restorative justice perspective, bring together victims, offenders, and sometimes community members to identify the needs and obligations of each that may lead to restitution and healing.

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April 24 2000, Vol. 44, No. 5