Gangs

The commune of Christiania, in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark, was supposed to be like Paradise. But life in this fallen world is always impacted by human sin.

Founded in 1971, Christiania was devised as a post-60s anarchistic utopia. It was a place where people could live outside of Denmark’s market economy, free to build their houses where and how they wanted, to sell marijuana for a living, and to live as they pleased as long as they didn’t harm their neighbors. Denmark’s government oscillated between attempting to bring the community to heel or turning a blind eye as residents flouted property laws and drug laws.

But now, after 50 years, with worsening gang violence and fresh attempts by the government to normalize the commune, some residents see their dream of an alternative society fading. The infamous Pusher Street, once operated mostly by residents but now overrun by gangs, may be the first domino to fall.

One lifelong resident said, “Growing up in Christiania was the best childhood ever. We had freedom. Pusher Street was very nice back then … Five to seven years ago [drug dealers] got much tougher. Now they only want profit. They don’t bring good vibes.”

Christiania has long embraced cannabis while shunning more dangerous substances. But as gangs overtook the drug trade, harder drugs made their way in, along with some of the violence of organized crime. After a recent shooting, Christiania’s residents, who operate a consensus democracy where decisions are made by unanimous assent in town-hall-style meetings, settled on two conclusions: that Pusher Street should be shuttered permanently, and that the state should intervene—an extraordinary step for the anti-establishment community.

Possible Preaching Angles:

This shows the power of original sin. Even when we try to recreate “paradise,” it never lasts for long.

Most people don’t take real estate advice from a drug dealer behind a gas station in North Minneapolis. But Larry Cook, bishop of Real Believers Faith Center, is not most people.

About a year ago he confronted some young men selling narcotics in the alley between his church and the corner store that seemed to do more business in illegal goods than snacks or fuel. Things got heated pretty quickly. Voices were raised.

“The owner don’t care about it,” one of the young men yelled, as Cook and his wife, Sharon, recall the confrontation. “If you want to do something about it, you need to buy the gas station.” “I will,” Cook responded. “I absolutely will.”

What the man selling drugs didn’t know is that Cook had actually been thinking about buying the store for the past 25 years. He believed he was being called and when the time was right, God would expand his ministry to include this sore spot in the neighborhood, the store at the corner of a busy intersection.

North Minneapolis has struggled for a long time. In the 1950s, there was a thriving African American community, with lots of families, churches, and Black-owned businesses. Then there was a wave of white flight, followed by racial unrest that scared away financial investors, and the construction of an interstate that cut Near North off from downtown. Today, the area is marked by instability and poverty.

In the fall of 2022, the store came up for sale, and Cook and his wife put everything they had toward the purchase of the $3 million property. They’ve now reopened it under the name the Lion’s Den, a testament to faith surrounded by danger and their belief that even urban blight can be redeemed.

Sharon Cook said, “This is what Jesus would do. If he was walking in 2023, he would buy this gas station. He would feed the hungry. He would lend a helping hand to the elderly the same way we’re doing.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Facing poverty, crime, and closing businesses, Christians can look to transform their communities.

Tim Keller, told the following story about a man named Hasheem Garrett, who learned the art of forgiveness. Hashim was a 15-year-old, living with his mother and hanging out on the streets of Brooklyn with a gang, when he was shot six times and was left paralyzed from the waist down.

For most of the next year he lay in a New York City hospital, fantasizing about revenge. He later wrote: “Revenge consumes me. All I could think about was, just wait, till I get better; just wait till I see this kid.”

But when he was lying on the sidewalk immediately after his shooting, he had instinctively called out to God for help, and, to his surprise, he had felt this strange tranquility. Now during his rehabilitation, a new thought, struck him, namely, that if he took revenge on this kid, why should God not pay him back for all his sins? He concluded, “I shot a kid for no reason, except that a friend told me to do it, and I wanted to prove how tough I was. Six months later, I am shot by somebody because his friend told him to do it.”

That thought was electrifying … He could not feel superior to the perpetrator. They were both fellow sinners who deserved a punishment—and needed forgiveness.

Hasheem said, “In the end I decided to forgive. I felt God had saved my life for a reason, and then I had better fulfill that purpose … And I knew I could never go back out there and harm someone. I was done with that mindset and the life that goes with it … I came to see that I had to let go and stop hating.”

In CT magazine, Greg Stier shares his journey from a violent dysfunctional family background to the salvation of his extended family:

To my five-year-old self, it was a perfect afternoon. No gunshots, no gang-filled cars creeping by looking for trouble as they often did in our neighborhood. Everything was good that day—at least until a shiny, new car pulled up. It was Paul, one of the men my Ma had married. He had up and left us without warning, and we hadn’t heard from him in months.

Ma caught sight of him out the kitchen window. Cursing like a sailor, she hunted down our baseball bat. Charging out of the house, she started swinging at the headlights and the windshield. When he peeled off, I knew we’d never see him again.

Instantly, I realized two things: One, I would never disobey Ma again. And two, something had ignited a rage in her that consistently led to incidents like this. Years later, my grandma told me what that something was.

Ma was a partier, and I was a result of one of the parties. She got pregnant. Instead of facing her conservative Baptist parents, Ma drove from Denver to Boston, under the pretense of visiting my uncle Tommy and aunt Carol. But she was really there to get an illegal abortion. Tommy and Carol talked her out of it.

Until my grandma told me I was almost aborted, I had wondered why Ma would often cry when she looked at me while reproaching herself: “I’m a bum. I’m nothing but a no-good bum.” But after I learned her secret, I understood—not only her tears, but her rage toward men. It was a shame-fueled rage.

My entire family was filled with rage. Ma had five bodybuilding, street-fighting brothers, whom the North Denver mafia nicknamed “the crazy brothers.” You know it’s bad when even the mafia thinks your family is dysfunctional.

My Baptist grandparents took me to church, and one day in “big church,” everything suddenly made sense. The preacher shared how Jesus died for our sins and rose again. He said that if we put our faith in him, we would be saved. At the age of eight, I trusted in Christ as my Savior.

Miraculously enough, at around the same time, God was working renewal within my family as well. A hillbilly, church-planting preacher nicknamed Yankee reached out to Uncle Jack, the toughest of the “crazy brothers,” on a dare. When Yankee knocked on the door, Jack had a beer can in each hand. Surprisingly, he listened to Yankee’s gospel presentation.

“Does that make sense?” Yankee asked Jack. “H***, yeah!” was his sinner’s prayer. In just one month, Jack brought 250 people to church, wanting them to hear this same good news that gave him hope. One by one, all my uncles came to Christ. But the person most on my heart was Ma.

When I tried telling her about Jesus, she would shut me down. She’d say, “God can’t forgive me. You don’t know the things I’ve done.” Finally, at the age of 15, I marched into the kitchen and made Ma listen to the gospel. “You mean to tell me that if I trust in Jesus, he forgives me for every sin?” she asked. “Even the really bad ones?” “Yeah, Ma. That’s why he died on the cross,” I explained.

She took a drag of her cigarette, stared off into space for a moment, and said, “I’m in.” And when my Ma said she was in, she was in.

At age eight, I had met the Father I’d never known, the Father who would never leave me nor forsake me, the Father who changed the trajectory of my life and the lives of my whole family.

Editor’s Note: Greg Stier is the founder of Dare 2 Share Ministries. He is the author of Unlikely Fighter: The Story of How a Fatherless Street Kid Overcame Violence, Chaos, and Confusion to Become a Radical Christ Follower.

Casey Diaz was a gang member as a teenager in South-Central Los Angeles. As a leader in the Rockwood Street Locos, he led his gang in home invasions, robbing convenience stores, and stabbing rival gang members.

He was eventually caught by LAPD and sentenced to nearly 13 years for second-degree murder. When he was transferred to New Folsom State Prison the guard said to him, “Listen closely, Diaz. We know that you’re a shot caller (a prison power-broker), so we’re putting you in solitary.” He was cooped up in an eight-by-ten-foot windowless box, with all his meals slipped in through a slot in the steel door.

The only source of illumination in his cell was a heavy Plexiglas light that couldn’t be turned off, which made it difficult to get any sleep. There was nothing to do—no TV, no radio, no books. He had been told by other prisoners that if a person is not strong-willed, then solitary confinement could absolutely break him.

He writes:

After about a year at New Folsom, as I was lying on my bed, I heard an older woman say, “Is there someone in that cell?” The guard said “Yes, ma’am, but you’re wasting your time.” She answered, “Well, Jesus came for him, too.”

She approached the cell: “How are you doing?” “I couldn’t be better,” was my sarcastic reply. She said “Young man, I’m going to pray for you. But there’s something else I want to tell you: Jesus is going to use you.”

A year later, he was lying down in his cell, daydreaming. When he looked at the wall, something strange was happening. A movie was playing, it was the crucifixion of Christ which he saw enacted in vivid detail.

He then writes:

What got to me most was when this man on the cross looked at me and said, “Darwin, I’m doing this for you.” I shuddered. Apart from the guards and my family, no one knew my real name. Everyone called me Casey. Then I heard the sound of breath leaving him. At that moment, I knew he had died.

That’s when I hit the floor in the middle of the cell. I started weeping because I knew, somehow, that this was Almighty God. I started confessing my sins: “God, I’m sorry for stabbing so many people. God, I’m sorry I robbed so many families.” With each new confession, I felt another weight come off my shoulders.

That was the start of my journey of faith. I was no longer a shot caller. I had found a new calling: telling other inmates about Jesus.

Editor’s Note: Casey Diaz lives in Los Angeles, where he serves as a part-time pastor.

In the early 1990s, gang violence erupted in Boyle Heights, a section of East Los Angeles. Eight gangs were in conflict in the parish around the Dolores Mission Catholic Church. Killings and injuries happened daily. A group of women who met for prayer read together the story of Jesus walking on water …. Then one of the mothers, electrified by the text, began to identify the parallels between the Jesus story and her own ….

That night, seventy women began … a procession from one barrio to another. They brought food, guitars, and love. As they ate chips and salsa and drank Cokes with gang members, [they began to sing traditional songs together]. The gangs were disoriented, baffled; the war zones were silent.

Each night the mothers walked. By nonviolently intruding and intervening, they "broke the rules of war." The old script of retaliation and escalating violence was challenged and changed. It is no accident that the women christened their nighttime journeys "love walks."

As the relationships between the women and the gang members grew, the kids told their stories. Anguish over lack of jobs; anger at police brutality; rage over the hopelessness of poverty. Together they developed a tortilla factory, a bakery, a child-care center, a job-training program, a class on conflict-resolution techniques, a school for further learning, a neighborhood group to monitor and report police misbehavior, and more.

And it began with the challenge "Get out of the boat" and "walk on water."

Charles Lyons, pastor of Armitage Baptist Church in Chicago, Illinois, writes:

People still get killed in my neighborhood. A 13-year-old kid gets gunned down at night, and the cops show up to clean up the mess and ask a few questions, but nobody knows anything. Nobody gets arrested. It creates a lonely, helpless, and hopeless atmosphere to live in. People think, Nobody cares, and nothing will change.

The night the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship in 1993, a young kid—I think his name was Julio—was caught up in the crowd leaving the arena. The Imperial Gangsters were out that night, making sure no rival gangs were blending in the crowd to cross their turf. I don't know if Julio was wearing the wrong colors or what, but somewhere in the midst of those sports fans, the Imperial Gangsters dragged him down and stabbed him to death. Nobody saw a thing.

The following Wednesday, I announced we were going on a prayer march. The church responded to the tragedy and even offered a reward for information leading to Julio's killers.

It wasn't the first time, or the last, that we got involved with a young man's slaying. When a kid gets shot in our neighborhood, we hold a prayer service on the exact spot where the kid died. We've had as many as 350 people show up for one of these.

We walk up and down the street, letting people know they're not alone and forgotten. We ask if there's anything we can pray with them about.

After getting in touch with the neighborhood, we hold a brief prayer vigil. The people are there—around the corner, in the alley, up in their windows—listening. We sing a few songs, offer a few pointed prayers for parents, the police, the gang members. Someone stands up in the back of a pickup truck and shares a five- minute gospel presentation. Then we wrap it up and go on.