‘A matter of survival’

LOUISVILLE — For the Rev. Dr. Angela Johnson, there came a moment when enough was enough.

As the pastor of Grace Hope Presbyterian Church in Smoketown — a historically African American neighborhood in Louisville since Civil War times — Johnson said that while “the whole issue of violence in the community has always been important” to her, it was more than important.

It was personal.

“Some of it is just from being in the skin I’m in,” Johnson said. “And having Black sons.”

Johnson can still vividly remember a time right before the Covid pandemic when as many as four people in the congregation were affected by gun violence over the course of just one week.

“One of them was a member’s cousin’s son who got shot,” she recalled. “It has just always been a thing in this community. Our ZIP code, 40203, was ranked as America’s 13th poorest ZIP code in 2011.”

But Grace Hope’s history of community activism as one of four historic African American congregations in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery long predates that year.

“Recently, from a post on the downtown Louisville’s Roots 101 African-American Museum‘s Facebook page, I learned that when the Klan was going to meet in Louisville in the 1970s, a community meeting was held at Grace Hope,” Johnson said. “And we are continuing the legacy of doing that work.”

Johnson’s search for any small yet tangible act of resistance that the 42-member congregation — which averages 17 in worship — could muster led her to connect with Guns to Gardens Louisville.

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“It was such a natural fit for who Grace Hope is,” she said of the interfaith group, which is part of a national Guns to Gardens movement that offers gun safe-surrender opportunities in more than a dozen states.

The 501(c)(3) nonprofit — whose name reflects its goal of “moving our community from a gun culture to a life-giving culture through activities that nurture peace and growth instead of violence” — has drawn volunteers from Presbyterian, Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal and Methodist churches; a Unitarian Universalist congregation; and two synagogues. The group had its genesis some five years ago in a youth/adult Sunday school class at Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church.

Ruling Elder Eva Stimson, who currently serves both on Crescent Hill’s session and the Guns to Gardens Louisville board, was a supporter from the beginning.

“Church members Lucy Steilberg and Carol Young were the ringleaders in helping the class to respond to the gun violence epidemic,” Stimson recalled. “The youth were very excited. Some even went to Washington, D.C., to lobby. After that, Lucy and Carol started having monthly meetings of what we called the Gun Violence Prevention Team to talk about gun violence and how we, as a church, could respond. That’s when I became involved.”

Like many congregations who participate in the Peace & Global Witness Offering, Crescent Hill is committed to the work of peacemaking at all levels of church and society.

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The annual Offering, which is highlighted during the Season of Peace, Sept. 7–Oct. 5, is traditionally received on World Communion Sunday, which falls this year on Oct. 5. Peace & Global Witness is unique in that half of the Offering is directed to efforts at the national church level for peacemaking and global witness work around the world, while 25% is retained by congregations for local peace and reconciliation work, and 25% goes to presbyteries for similar ministries on the regional level.

“Because the church has long seen the uniquely American affliction of gun violence as antithetical to its vision of God’s peaceable kingdom, for many decades the church has worked to curb the scourge of gun violence,” said Dr. Andrew J. Peterson, associate for Peacemaking for the Office of Public Witness in the Interim Unified Agency of the PC(USA). “But as gun violence across the country peaked during the pandemic, much as Rev. Johnson described, a group of concerned presbyteries called on the church at the 224th General Assembly (2020) to review and renew its commitment to ending gun violence. At the next General Assembly in 2022, the church officially voted to answer this call by creating the ‘Decade to End Gun Violence.’”

Now in its third year, the Decade to End Gun Violence (2022–32) is “a 10-year campaign … to be conducted at all levels of the church,” which would update its educational resources, develop new liturgical resources and build up the church’s faith-based gun violence prevention advocacy. The 225th General Assembly (2022) also approved a limited fund, administered by the OPW, to help PC(USA) congregations, mid councils, worshiping communities and institutions conduct events to combat gun violence, such as Louisville’s safe-surrender events.

Johnson said that although Grace Hope wanted to be the first congregation to host Guns to Gardens Louisville’s first such event in 2022, ironically — if perhaps predictably — they couldn’t.

Because of crime.

“We were going to have the event across the street from the church, but the building got vandalized,” Johnson said. “Because we were later able to get up and running, Grace Hope was finally able to host a safe-surrender opportunity last fall.”

On Nov. 10, 2024, the team of volunteers received 14 guns plus assorted other weapons such as knives, brass knuckles and slingshots. One by one, they took turns chopping up the weapons to be turned into garden tools, art and jewelry later by a local blacksmith, evoking Isaiah 2:4 as the faithful “beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Johnson said that although “it would have been great if more of our Smoketown neighbors had come to turn in their guns,” she knows the event did some good. At a similar safe-surrender event held the previous fall at Westwood Presbyterian Church, an African American congregation in Louisville’s historic West End, five guns were collected, including the initiative’s first assault rifle.

“I love to hear the stories of the people who are turning in their weapons,” said Johnson. “I’m thinking of one person’s implement in particular, a knife. They had leather wrapped around the handle and told me someone had used it to cut themselves. You’re still saving a life whether it’s a gun or not.”

Although gift cards are offered to those who surrender weapons, not everyone accepts.

“‘I don’t want the gift card,’ one person told me,” Johnson recalled. “‘I just want to get rid of this. Give the gift card to someone who really needs it.’”

Johnson, who also serves on the executive committee of CLOUT (Citizens of Louisville Organized and United Together) — a grassroots organization of 24 religious congregations working together to solve such critical community problems as gun violence — is deeply invested in CLOUT’s Community Safety & Equity Committee (police-community relations) as its co-chair and supports CLOUT’s gun violence reduction issue committee.

“I see the consequences of what happens, but really the epidemic is all around us,” she said. “It’s not even determined by a community anymore; so many people are affected and touched by it — but it’s really just a matter of survival for me.”

For Stimson, the gun violence issue resonated with her most powerfully following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

“Why do we need all these guns?” she wondered after yet another tragic school shooting. “I knew this was an issue that we, as Christians, needed to get involved in, but I had no idea how hard it would be to get anything changed, especially in Kentucky. And we’re not trying to take guns away from people. It’s just that it’s really hard to get rid of guns, and people who have children around don’t want to have weapons in the house. Suicide is another big issue we can address by getting the gun out of the home. That’s what we’re going for.”

Peterson said that the OPW is vigorously working on expanding the church’s gun violence witness in just these and other critically important ways.

“We’ve just launched a new partnership with Be SMART, an organization that has lent us their excellent resources on secure gun storage, an essential way of keeping kids safe from improperly stored firearms,” he said. “We have liturgical resources in development, and we continue to support a variety of congregation- and presbytery-level gun prevention events through the Decade’s grant programs, one of which is new this year and is focused on expanding these events in the cities with the highest per capita rates of gun homicide. I’m honored to get to do this work alongside a tremendously inspiring cast of partners like Rev. Johnson and Eva.”

And Stimson is equally dedicated to supporting peacemaking at the national, presbytery and congregational levels through the Peace & Global Witness Offering.

“Because Crescent Hill usually has at least one ‘Minute for Mission’ leading up to the Offering, we’ve talked about Guns to Gardens as part of that,” she said. “And since we used our portion of the Offering this past year for our church’s own grassroots initiative, that’s how we promoted it to our congregation. Here’s a group that got started right here! If you give, part of your money will go to support our mission to ‘pursue what makes for peace.’”