c. 1997 Religion News Service

INDIANAPOLIS _ Even as other cities watch their crime rates fall, Indianapolis finds itself in the middle of what is likely to be its second record year of homicides. So Don Howard has little reason to believe prayer will stop the violence.

But still, Howard prays. And he is not alone.

Howard prays at the places where people are gunned down, where they’ve been stabbed or beaten to death _ in front of houses and apartments; on sidewalks and parking lots; outside toy stores in the suburbs and pawn shops downtown. He is one of some 500 people who have been attending such prayer vigils for peace since February 1996.”God is answering our prayers. I have to believe that,”said Howard, a retired telephone company worker.”How many people would be dying like this if we didn’t pray?” Since January, 112 people have been killed violently in Indianapolis. During all of last year, 120 people were murdered. A new kind of community has formed around this violence.

While mainline Protestant church leaders legislate ecumenical partnership at their denominational conventions, here Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians are joining Catholics, evangelicals and Pentecostals in simple worship to their common God.

While Promise Keepers and the Christian Coalition wage million-dollar campaigns for racial reconciliation, blacks, whites and Hispanics in the prayer network are coming together without regard to race. They have become an ecumenical and interracial congregation without walls.

At its center is a brief but complete liturgy filled with Scripture readings, testimony and hymns. Most mornings about 30 people show up for the 15-minute service.

Someone offers an invocation and the group begins to read from the Bible _ Romans 8:31-39. After more than 230 vigils, most people no longer read from the photocopied order of worship distributed at each service. They know the words by heart:”I am sure that nothing can separate us from God’s love _ not life or death, not angels or spirits, not the present or the future.” Together they recite Psalm 23:”Even though I walk through the valley of death, I fear no evil. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” Then individuals offer personal prayers for the victims, their families and the city. The group joins hands to say the Lord’s Prayer and sing its own verse of the civil rights hymn,”We Shall Overcome”:”Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall live in hope today.” The service ends with sacrament: the anointing of the ground with holy oil as the congregation reads from Revelations 21.

Before each vigil, ministers in the network try to contact someone who knew the victim to pray with them, to invite them to the vigil or at the very least to extend sympathy.

When a friend or parent or sibling of a victim does come, the service becomes like a funeral. Prayers turn into memorials of a lost life and stories of a family in pain.

That’s what happened earlier this month when Alpha Mitchell came to the vigil to pray with strangers for her son, Vernon Woods. The 28-year-old man was shot on the northside of Indianapolis Aug. 12.”I can’t explain how God is giving me the strength, but he is,”Mitchell said.”He is in the people who are doing this for my son and my family.” On the rare week that no one is killed in Indianapolis, people in the prayer network say they still long to connect with one another, said the Rev. Catherine Newlin, one of the vigil organizers. So there is talk of holding a weekly vigil downtown in thanksgiving for peace and to increase awareness of the need for demonstrations against violence.

It’s an idea that will bring the prayer network back to its roots. In 1995, the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis began organizing the vigils after a protest against alleged police brutality turned into a riot in a northside neighborhood.

Since then, religious organizations in Louisville, Ky., and Gary and Evansville, Ind., have expressed interest in forming similar prayer networks.

The group never intended to influence other cities, said the Rev. Ivan Jenkins of Grace United Methodist Church. It just wanted to reach out to the people and neighborhoods of Indianapolis.”I think this is cementing us into a community in lots of ways that we hadn’t imagined,”he said.”We’re trying to be the face of God to one another.”

MJP END CEBULA