Community United Church of Christ in Boulder, Colorado, held the first Guns to Gardens event with a nonprofit network of blacksmiths called RAWtools after a gunman killed 10 people last year at a grocery store in the city, according to the Rev. Nancy Farrar Halden.
The church prayed and organized listening circles to determine how to act. It then invited people to bring unwanted guns to an event at the church, where those present watched as the weapons were sawed into pieces. Later, the church hosted a healing event for the community, where blacksmiths transformed those pieces into garden tools and jewelry.
“Having it be hosted by a faith community was something that had never happened before, and then the best thing happened, which is that it inspired a whole other thing beyond what we could have even imagined in terms of just congregations outside of our tradition doing this,” Farrar Halden said.
On June 11, Presbyterian Peace Fellowship is partnering with churches and organizations across the country to organize more than a dozen Guns to Gardens events. Additional events and trainings for interested churches are planned later this summer and fall, according to Hollas.
“We cannot turn away when there is such tragedy,” she said.
“We are the ones who comfort the families, who bury the dead, and we can’t just do that without asking, ‘What can we do to stop this?’ Because we know that this doesn’t happen in other countries, other peer nations. This is a unique problem to the United States, and it has to do with our gun laws.”
This article originally appeared here.
