- So strong community partnerships are key to addressing the root causes of violence.

The Black Church is an integral part in that effort.

Here to talk about reducing gun violence are Reverend Lawrence Rodgers, Senior Pastor at Second Baptist Church, and Teferi Brent, who is the Director of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety.

Welcome to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you.

- Yes, thank you.

- 19th Annual Silence the Violence March.

This is, I think, one of the great focal points in the city that brings people's attention to the idea that we still struggle an awful lot with violence, and gun violence in particular.

The Black Church is where that was founded.

I love that, I love that detail that Pastor Barry came up with this idea, and you could see all kinds of churches involved.

But I want to start with having the two of you talk about the bigger role that Black churches play in reducing violence in in our city.

You are home to the population here, the Black population in this city.

Everybody goes to, I say, at least one church in Detroit.

We have so many.

So talk about the role that the Black Church has played and is playing in that violence reduction that we have to be mindful of all the time.

I'll start with you, Reverend Rodgers.

- I want to thank you so much for the invitation to speak on this important subject.

One of the places where the Black Church has served tirelessly around gun violence are the many funerals- - Yes.

- That we have to officiate, where we have to comfort families- - Mm-hm, and communities, entire communities.

- And communities.

And we have to develop messages of hope and restoration in a great tragic event.

And that's oftentimes the work that is not elevated or thought about, but it's a labor to spend your career having to bury- - To bury people.

- People who lives were cut short due to gun violence.

- And when you're doing that, talk about the work that goes beyond that funeral with the family and the community, a church that loses somebody to gun violence.

- Absolutely.

So I feel that it's oftentimes in the wake of such tragedies that we really elevate the teachings of Jesus, teachings of restoration, teachings of collective and community healing around themes such as repentance and also themes such as forgiveness, helping individuals be talked off the ledge of perpetuating gun violence in response to someone who they are grieving, who they lost.

And so, I mean, that is a deep work.

It's oftentimes a silent work.

It's a unseen work, but it's a critical work.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Teferi, you kind of have a foot in two different worlds that touch on this.

Of course, you're working with the mayor and the city's efforts to sort of intervene in gun violence.

But you also are really involved at Fellowship Chapel, where I know this issue is center in some of the work.

So give us a sense from your standpoint in both of those worlds, I guess where we are with this idea of reducing gun violence.

- Yeah.

I think it's critical to understand that the Black Church has always been the substratum of all significant Black social movements in this country.

We have always been the undergirding, right, the lynchpin that has really drove all liberation movements, all peace movements.

And we've really been the standard for the entire world.

Every other movement and every other form of struggle by every other culture group was really borne out of the example that we have historically set as the Black Church.

I think for me theologically, you know, we need to understand that the very foundation of the church is the ideal of peace, for Scripture teaches us that we are to strive for peace and promote it.

The Scripture teaches us that Jesus is the Prince of Peace.

The Scripture teaches that we are to be ambassadors of peace.

It says, "Blessed is the peacemaker, for his is the son of God," right.

So the church has a mandate to be intimately involved in not just addressing the back end of violence, which of course, as Pastor referenced, helping the families through the grieving process and the healing journey.

But more importantly, the church's ultimate responsibility has to be involved in the prevention and the intervention.

And it's always been the church that really, that has initiated that movement.

I mean, when you look at here in the city of Detroit, the architect of the urban peace and justice movement- - Yes.

- Which became really the stepping stone for what we now call community violence intervention, right, or the Build Peace Movement, was a woman who was married to a pastor, who was a bona fide Christian.

Her name is Ms.

Clementine Barfield.

19, July of 1986, her son, who was my friend, Derick Barfield, was murdered, right.

And then January of 1987, the Spirit moves in her, she gets activated.

She organizes other surviving mothers and fathers, and she starts a organization called Save Our Sons and Daughters.

- SOSAD, right.

- Save our Sons and Daughters created the programming that addressed the issues in our community that the criminal, the issues in our community that lead to criminogenic behavior.

You know, it addressed illiteracy.

It spoke and met and addressed the concerns of men who were incarcerated.

It set up a peace programming in DPS.

In fact, she created a peace curriculum.

You know, she was doing diversionary work.

She was dealing with shooters in the community.

I mean, in fact, SOSAD was known to be the place that before individuals got involved in gang violence, before they pulled the trigger, they would come to the SOSAD building for a moratorium.

It was Ms.

Barfield who set up a SOSAD office in Homicide in DPD, right.

I'm saying, so all of this work around peace, right, has always been rooted in the Black Church.

Pastor Barry is just a continuation.

I am a continuation of the foundation laid by Ms.

Barfield in the early 1980s.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

What about the city's role in all of this?

And the transition from one mayor to the next, the trends that are happening in the city, which for us in Detroit, you know, have been kind of a bright spot lately.

I mean, we are seeing reductions in some of the violence that we've lived with for a long time.

Talk about from that city standpoint, though, where we are and what we're doing.

- Oh, yeah.

So we are continuing to work.

I want to first acknowledge and applaud the previous mayor, Mike Duggan, for working with us to construct what we call the ShotStopper program.

- Right.

- Which is a CVI program that involves seven different CBOs who are directly involved in doing community violence intervention work on the ground.

So I want to applaud him for that.

I would definitely want to applaud then-Council President Sheffield and Councilman Durhal and Councilwoman Calloway and Councilman Tate and others who were intimately involved in making sure that this CVI programming was funded and resourced for the long-term, right.

Madam Mayor, when she becomes mayor, she transitions, of course, from council president to becoming mayor.

It was one of her initiatives, right?

- Yes.

- One of her platform items to establish an Office of Violence Prevention, which we call the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety.

There are over 60 of them throughout the country at the local level, and 12 at the state level.

So Madam Mayor was just, you know, she recognized the data, she did the research, and she saw the trends, and she saw what was effective when it comes to addressing gun violence.

And she understands you cannot arrest your way - Right - Into public safety.

You cannot prosecute your way into peace.

You have to create programming utilizing a whole of government interagency public health approach to address the root causes of criminogenic behavior that leads to violent acts.

So this is what the office is designed to do.

The office is designed to build community-based safety initiatives through a public health lens to help us address the variables that contribute to violent behavior before violence occurs in the first place.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Reverend Rodgers, I want to talk to you about young people, and young people particularly in your congregation and how you address this issue with them.

I mean, so much of the violence in the city visits on our young people.

I feel like they are also pushed in many ways by folks they know who are involved in violence.

I mean, it's kind of where it takes root often.

So I wonder what that looks like in your congregation and how you address it with them.

- I really appreciate that question, because it's important that when we look at the matter of gun violence, that we don't only look at it from a macro level of numbers and, you know, numbers and slogans, et cetera.

- Yeah.

- These are real people's lives.

- Yeah.

- This is real trauma.

Sometimes it's generational trauma.

And so it matters that we continue to humanize and elevate the stories.

That's important and that's critical.

And I believe that something that's also very important, is that young people need to see in every church a healthy model for a conflict resolution.

- [Stephen] Hmm.

- 'Cause sometimes there's violence happening with individuals, but there's just not any guns involved.

- Right.

- And so the young people have to see conflict resolution modeled so that they can de-escalate conflicts that they experience in their world.

- Yeah.

- That is critical.

And we have taught conflict resolution classes.

It's also important that churches consider having gun safety programs.

I work with the Council of Baptist Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity, where I serve as the Chair of Political and Social Action, and we brought in a gun instructor to have gun safety classes and to bring gun locks for us to pass out to our members, and to also go to our churches and talk about gun safety, 'cause many of the deaths from gun violence are accidental fires.

- Accidental, yeah.

- So a young person got a hold of a gun and fired it and actually harmed themselves, if not tragically killed themselves.

Furthermore, there's about, I believe it's about 44,000 gun deaths annually in America.

About 62% of that are due to suicide.

- Suicides, right.

- Someone has decided to take a firearm and to end their life.

And it's important that we talk about mental health.

Our churches are ground zero to destigmatize mental health.

We have got to do the work of destigmatizing mental health, of being willing to admit that we are depressed, to not hide behind religious clichés, such as I'm too blessed to be stressed, which really makes no sense because Jesus was so stressed in the Garden of Gethsemane that the Bible says that his sweat was like droplets of blood.

That's how stressed he was.

And there's not a single blessing that I can ever receive that's not gonna come with some stressing as well.

So these sort of sayings further stigmatize people who are stressed, who are depressed, who are anxious, who are dealing with a personality disorder or some issue, which also feeds into conflict management as well.

So it's important that we do the destigmatization.

So I tell my church that, you know, I go to therapy.

I tell my church about my own mental health and how I am in the process of healing, and how I've been in the process of being healed.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- Because it's important that we ourselves- - That they see themselves in you.

- Show our people, yeah, so that they will feel comfortable to go out and get help as well.

And I just want to also say that this is not an either/or proposition.

Because some people, they will commit suicide as a way to end it, and others will live in a very destructive way, which is a longer way of killing yourself.

- Right.

- But the end goal is still your self-destruction.

- Yeah.

- And both of these matters could be both fueled by depression.

So mental health is also critically important that our churches help to do the work.

We should have mental health programs.

We have 'em at Second all the time.

Mental health programs, community outreach programs to help people to destigmatize mental health, to get help, and also conflict resolution programming so that young people can learn how to de-escalate.

And if I could also say quickly, that is even more important in the social media age.

- Yeah, right.

- Where they see reactionary behavior all the time while they're scrolling.

We have to start teaching them another way: consequential thinking, long-term thinking, how to respond instead of react.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

We only have a couple minutes left, but I want to get you to talk just a little about goals for the city's involvement here, this new office that the mayor has.

In the short-term, obviously building on the CVI work is one of them.

But talk about some other things that you hope to achieve this year and in the next.

- Yeah.

Well, without question, I mean, CVI, our community violence intervention groups, are the very, very core, right.

It's the substratum upon which the rest of the ecosystem lands, right?

And the ecosystem is responsible for serving those individuals who are on the ground and those organizations who are in the community doing the work to address some of the issues that our wonderful Pastor was alluding to.

- Yeah.

- Right, you know.

So it is our vision and it is our objective within the first year to build out our DV/IPV intervention and prevention programming.

- Okay.

- Which, you know, it is our intentions to also build out our conflict resolution restorative practice coordination centers and programming.

We will have a liaison that's responsible for helping to teach that in our communities throughout the city.

It is our intentions to also strengthen and to build a strong reentry services department within my office, right, where we would have a reentry liaison who's responsible for addressing the needs of justice-impacted people, adults and children, male and female.

Those are some of the things that we are hoping to build out within the first year.

Then of course, we're gonna also have a survivor services and survivor advocacy liaison who will be responsible for resourcing those victims of gun violence and victims of sexual assault and victims of domestic violence.

But domestic violence and intimate partner violence is a big issue because as we begin to improve in regards to homicides, you know, we're at a 65-year low.

In 2025, we had 165.

When I started this work in 1987 under Ms.

Barfield, or rather, when Ms.

Barfield started this work in 1987, we had 637 homicides, right.

- Right.

- So we're down to 165, you know, and that was inconceivable.

- Right.

- So as we get better in that space, as we get better at expanding our public safety model to include community stakeholders, we have to now get more granular in our analysis of the data to see what is causing great harm in our community.

And what we've discovered is that 19.5% of our homicides has a DV/IPV nexus.

So we have to do what Pastor said.

We have to equip our neighborhood association leaders, our block hub leaders, our families within our communities with conflict resolution skills, with restorative practice skills, with de-escalation skills, with anger management skills, with critical thinking skills to help address conflict in a more peaceful way.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Reverend Rodgers, Teferi Brent, great to have both of you here, and congratulations on the work.

- Thank you so much.

- Yeah.