[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Diocese of the Great Lakes and Assisting Bishop Anne Hodges-Copple issued a statement calling for prayers after a Sept. 28 mass shooting and arson attack at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints meetinghouse in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, a suburb of Flint, left four people dead and eight others injured.
“We are called to pray for our Mormon siblings in Grand Blanc, that they may know the peace that passes understanding,” the Sept. 28 statement, signed by Hodges-Copple and the Rev. Molly Bosscher, president of the diocese’s standing committee, said. “Just as so many of us were doing this morning, they were worshiping God in a place they love with people they love.”
While the Latter-day Saints were gathered for Sunday morning worship, Thomas Jacob Sanford, a 40-year-old military veteran from nearby Burton, allegedly rammed his vehicle into the meetinghouse and opened fire, killing at least two people with an assault rifle. He also allegedly started a fire at the meetinghouse.
Grand Blanc police said that officers killed Sanford in a parking lot behind the church. The FBI is investigating a motive, according to news reports.
St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Grand Blanc is located 1.7 miles from the Latter-day Saints meetinghouse. The church reported Sept. 28 via Facebook that “we can see the smoke billowing from our church. God have mercy on us all.”
St. Christopher’s that same day in a Facebook post offered its building for use as office space and worship services for the Latter-day Saints.
“We are all Gods (sic) children,” the post said.
Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry, a convener of the Bishops United Against Gun Violence network, issued a statement Sept. 28 condemning the attack as “reprehensible.”
“We can presume that the shooter was angry. Clearly, he was violent. There also may have been mental health issues involved. But what we know with complete and absolute certainty is that he had ready access to an assault-style rifle. The availability of firearms makes this crime commonplace in the United States of America, and unthinkable in most every other country in the world,” Perry said. “Day after day Americans shoot each other, while we as a nation stand by and watch gun companies make money, and beloved Children of God die. Enough.”
As of Sept. 29, 324 mass shootings have occurred in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an American nonprofit that catalogs every gun-related death in the United States. A mass shooting is defined as one in which at least four people are shot, either fatally or non-fatally, excluding the shooter.
The shooting at the Grand Blanc Latter-day Saints meetinghouse is the latest in a recent series of unrelated mass shootings at places of worship, including, most recently, in August at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
“Within the current climate of the news and our country, [the shooting in Grand Blanc is] especially unsettling and even overwhelming,” Hodges-Copple and Bosscher said. “We’re called to pray that peace may prevail on earth, and then we’re called to enact that peace with our bodies.”
-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.