New Beginnings Senior Pastor Corey Brooks, who founded in 2011 the nonprofit community vitalization group “Project H.O.O.D.” – Helping Others Obtain Destiny – recruited Grooms to the church in 2018.
Brooks has raised $18 million, he told Baptist Press July 11, amid a $35 million fundraising campaign to build a community center aimed at deterring crime and encouraging success on Chicago’s South Side.
Brooks brought attention to Chicago’s rising crime by spending 100 nights from Nov. 30, 2021-Feb. 28, 2022, on a Chicago rooftop inviting people to visit and discuss ideas, solutions and opportunities to curb gun violence.
“Violence is like cancer: You can see it spreading,” Brooks told Baptist Press in January. “When you don’t deal with the violence, when you don’t handle it as you should, it continues to escalate not only here but in Memphis, St. Louis, New Orleans, San Francisco. … You have to intervene in people’s lives before they start down a pathway toward destruction.”
Grooms encourages Southern Baptist not only to pray but also to conduct and support similar ministries to deter gun violence.
Every church has an opportunity to minister to underserved communities that are near them or within driving distance.
“It may not be as bad, but there is a form of it that’s happening in your area,” Grooms said. “I would say this to the church. Be the church. You cannot change what you fear. If you are afraid to touch them, if you are afraid to talk to them, if you are afraid to be around them, you can’t change them. You can’t be the change for them.
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“Don’t fear them. Be the change.”
This article originally appeared at Baptist Press.
