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Three months after rioting exposed racial fault lines in Cincinnati, the city's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood still smells of burnt wood and melted plastic. Drug dealers whip out stoppered test tubes with what looks like a brown-green leafy filling. Hookers chat in a small group.

Three neighborhood kids, Courtney, Robert, and Ryan, crunch glass from shattered windows as they walk past open trash bins and gutted buildings. They lead a visitor to where Timothy Thomas ran from police before he was shot and killed at about 2 a.m. April 7, a Saturday. Courtney turns into a narrow alley where every street light has been knocked out. At the alley's end, next to what looks like an old outhouse, a spot of blue paint marks the site where a single shot from a white officer's gun killed Thomas, a 19-year-old African-American man.

The fatal shooting has catapulted Damon Lynch III, the evangelical pastor of the nearby New Prospect Baptist Church, to national prominence. Reports of the incident passed like wildfire through the African-American community, still raw over two previous shootings. Lynch, 41, and a large crowd went to police headquarters on the Monday after the shooting and demanded answers. Despite Lynch's pleas, the crowd became unruly. Protests and sporadic conflicts continued into Tuesday.

On Wednesday, April 11, Lynch and other ministers calmed a first wave of protesters, but by evening the city had a riot on its hands. Phil Heimlich, a white, 49-year-old conservative city council member and an evangelical leader in the community, charged the mayor, Charles Luken, a white liberal Democrat, with tying the hands of police. Luken then declared a state of emergency and imposed a citywide curfew. After the arrests of nearly 1,000 people and an estimated $2 million in property damage and lost revenues, the riots ended.

The violence has done more than damage buildings. It has set back years worth of delicate faith-based racial work. Many of the city's Christian leaders, including Lynch and Heimlich, find themselves deeply at odds, accusing one another of promoting lawlessness or lacking compassion. Despite their greatly different backgrounds, Lynch and Heimlich have had much in common. They share the same spiritual mentor, Tom Smith. They met their wives at the same workplace. Their families have eaten together, and they share a commitment to solving urban problems.

Lynch talked to Christianity Today about the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood youth who started the rioting. Over-the Rhine's decline has been a long time in the making. A century ago, it was home to 90,000 people. Today it has about 7,600, and 77 percent are African Americans.

As Lynch speaks, he seems to choose his words with great caution. He is given to long silences as he thinks things through. Lynch says that many of Cincinnati's churches, turned off by urban youth with their gold chains and rap music, stopped reaching out to them. But Lynch has made a public commitment not to give up on youth in Over-the-Rhine. After the Thomas shooting, young people streamed to New Prospect Baptist Church, which opened its doors to them.

Lynch, who has led a series of sit-ins and demonstrations since the riots, positions himself as the person who can talk to rioters on the streets: "I reach them by offering to stand with them, in front of them and for them."

But Heimlich, a former local prosecutor, shakes his head on hearing such comments from Lynch. Heimlich and others sense that Lynch's agenda is more about politics than peacemaking. "Integrity means more than just telling the truth," Heimlich says. "It means doing the right thing for the right reasons."

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July 8 2001, Vol. 45, No. 9