When I was out-of-state visiting a friend last year, I received a startling text from my wife informing me a drive-by shooting had occurred on our street in Chicago. I immediately called her, and with a trembling voice, she described how she hit the floor of our apartment when gunshots rattled outside. She said it even felt like something had hit our wall. Police eventually arrived, and sure enough, they discovered a bullet had struck our building, entering the apartment of a neighbor across the courtyard.
In the aftermath of the shooting, my wife and I felt constantly unsettled. Any loud bang would cause us to freeze. As much as I was disturbed by what had happened, I was also haunted by what didn’t. Every few hours I searched online to see if I could find coverage of the incident, but nothing showed up. I reached out to a reporter, who explained that the news outlet doesn’t typically cover shootings unless someone’s physically harmed. I even downloaded a police database and isolated our block but found no record of the shooting.
Unfortunately, what we experienced was only the beginning of a cascade of violence. Last year, on a city block where I boarded a public train for my commute to law school, there were five shootings, three of them fatal. Earlier this year, five gunshots awoke my wife and me shortly after midnight. We soon learned that a man had been shot and killed outside the apartment building next to ours. He was 28 years old—the same age as me.
This time, I felt less worried for my own safety. I had learned that these types of shootings were rarely indiscriminate. They almost always targeted specific individuals, usually related to long-standing gang feuds. Although the murder outside my door reminded me that the risk of a stray bullet was non-zero, I knew no one was out to target me. I would stay alert, but I felt I would be fine.
This recognition, however, almost made things worse. I had come to see that the victims of violence are typically the most invisible of my neighbors. They exist in the periphery and are almost always Black or brown young men. Their suffering often felt unseen. If you didn’t hear the gunshots yourself or personally know the victim, you wouldn’t know someone’s life had been taken. There were no public memorials. No family members on the news lamenting the loss of the victim. Neighbors simply slipped away, never to be seen again, and the rest of us went on with our lives, unperturbed.
I thought, This is not as it was meant to be. Surely Jesus, who wept for the death of his friend Lazarus, is weeping at the murders of people made in his image. But am I? Is my church?
In the past few years, much has been made about violence in cities like mine. President Donald Trump has described Chicago as a “hellhole,” threatening to send in the National Guard despite the objection of our elected officials. After local officials pushed back, Trump signed an order this week to deploy the National Guard—already active in Washington, DC—to Memphis over the objection of the city’s mayor. He also continued to threaten a deployment to Chicago, saying the city was probably next and others, such as New Orleans and St. Louis, might follow.
I understand why many people might be open to such measures. Violence destroys communities, and it’s appropriate to yearn for safety and peace. But in our political moment, I believe we should emphatically reject sending in the National Guard or any other militarized law enforcement as the solution to everyday civilian violence. I am hopeful that we can produce lasting change in our cities without embracing a rather extreme policy with lasting ramifications on how we interact with law enforcement and live in our communities.
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I’m hopeful because I’ve seen dramatic reductions of horrifying violence with my own eyes. I had the privilege of working with International Justice Mission (IJM) in the Dominican Republic, where IJM’s program focused on stopping one specific form of violence: the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Over eight years of work, the organization witnessed a 78 percent reduction in the prevalence of commercial sexual exploitation of children, a finding external evaluators confirmed.
That experience taught me that violence begins to decline when we take seriously Scripture’s commands to care for the vulnerable. In the Dominican Republic and throughout much of the world, survivors of sex trafficking are stigmatized, overlooked, and viewed as deserving the trauma they endure. But things started to shift in the Caribbean nation when IJM communicated that victims bear the image of God and that society ought to care for them as such. IJM, of course, didn’t do this alone; it worked alongside hundreds of local churches that joined regularly for prayer and exerted significant efforts to support our program.
Similarly, I’m convinced that in the US the problem of violence will not end until we proclaim the worth and dignity of every life. I know right now some might be thinking, But the typical victim may also have been a perpetrator. Isn’t that person among the “wicked” whom the Lord opposes (Ps. 146:9)? or How can we say that person is vulnerable?
Often, when we make objections like this, we fail to realize that we do not scrutinize victims of other violence in the same way. For example, American Christians have had significant empathy for victims of sex trafficking, like those I worked with in the Dominican Republic. At times, this empathy stems from a simplistic—and largely false—narrative of an innocent girl who is abducted and violated. But this is rarely the story in real life.
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The average sex-trafficking victim is highly vulnerable, has experienced multiple severe traumas, may be criminally active, and often has substance-abuse struggles. In short, these victims are imperfect and sometimes perpetrators of violence themselves, not unlike many victims of urban violence. But imperfect as they might be, they need advocates who reflect a God “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4) and who proclaim their status as image bearers.
In the Dominican Republic, my former colleagues often heard people start their sentences with words like esas niñas, or “those girls.” Then many would go on to list disparaging adjectives— addicted to drugs, nasty, violent, difficult. These characterizations are not far from the narrative of American violence we see on the news or social media.
Militarized responses motivated by a “hellhole” characterization will only lead to a country where victims are treated more like monsters and less like people with worth and dignity. It is human nature, as God warns against, to turn away from our own flesh and blood (Isa. 58:7). The racial history of the United States—from white flight to the suburbs to restrictive racial housing covenants—has forced us away from one another. However, the tendency to put others at arm’s length is not exclusive to Americans. I also saw it in the Dominican Republic, where most individuals, Christians included, condemned and avoided victims of sex trafficking.
Violence there started to topple only as humble, committed advocates drew near to the victims. Investigations took time—officials patiently and meticulously started to build strong legal cases before making arrests. They sought to understand each situation before acting. Many of these local officials were eager to improve. They were open to our program evaluating the quality of their work and giving them feedback, an attitude which showed an admirable level of humility. Over eight years of work, displays of force were rarely, if ever, required to produce a dramatic reduction in child sex trafficking.
As child sex trafficking initially was in the Dominican Republic, violence in the US is sustained by a crisis of proximity. Sociologist Andrew Papachristos, who has extensively studied violence in Chicago, has found it is rarely random. Rather, it’s contained in small networks of people, where the line between victim and perpetrator is blurred. The same holds true in other areas around the country. In a study of violence in Boston, for example, researchers found that 85 percent of all gunshot injuries occurred within a single social network.
Those far from such problems are the most likely to call places like Chicago or Memphis “hellholes,” while the victims themselves suffer endlessly. But these patterns and feelings, to be clear, are not new. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about them in his reflections on living in Chicago in 1966, noting that American society was “willing to let the frustrations born of racism’s violence become internalized and consume its victims” in our cities. “America’s horror was only expressed,” he wrote, “when the aggression turned outward.” In other words, urban violence exists in part due to deliberate actions—both in the past and present—that oppress some while isolating them from the rest of society.
We’re unlikely to stomp out violence in our cities until we follow the example of Jesus, who did not consider himself better than us but rather took the very nature of a servant, becoming like us, living among us, and working for our restoration (Phil. 2:3–7). There are many organizations scattered in our cities that are involved in this Christlike work. In my own city, organizations like the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, Breakthrough, and One Northside are leading this charge.
But this work doesn’t just need programs. It requires God’s people to earnestly seek him in prayer. Scripture tells us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). As one commentary on the Book of Revelation notes, “Spiritual evil … always eventually reverts to physical violence,” and “as evil seeks to assert itself against the kingship of the Lamb, it generates civil strife.”
When I worked for IJM, we began our workday with 30 minutes of corporate stillness, which gave us time to seek God individually. Then, every day, we would spend 30 minutes in corporate prayer, petitioning God for justice, much like the persistent widow in the Gospel of Luke. We prayed daily for help for victims, for righteous leaders, for stamina for ourselves, for the love of Christ to abound in our lives, for joy. We lamented and cried. My colleagues sang, and they sang loud, belting out praises to God and asking him to work on earth.
Since I’ve been back in my own country, I have wrestled with whether it’s easier for American evangelicals to pray for violence abroad than to pray for our own cities. To be honest, the question haunts me. I can say that in my own church in Chicago, I have rarely heard a prayer for God to intervene in the violence of our community. And many of us within the congregation have experienced that violence to some degree.
Even as my heart is heavy pondering these issues, I rarely turn to God in prayer. My mind goes to strategies and words, neglecting the truth that God sits on the throne, ready to answer his people. Perhaps all of us should start in prayer. And then, from there, let’s take Scripture seriously in its commitment to the marginalized and move closer to those bearing the brunt of violence in our cities.
Grant Everly is an attorney based in Chicago. He has worked at the intersection of violence and trauma in areas such as migration, human trafficking, and criminal justice in the United States and throughout Latin America.
