Lift high the cross

Greg Zanis left his home in Aurora, Ill., and drove to El Paso, Texas, where he delivered 22 handmade crosses—painted white with red hearts and the names of the shooting victims—to a memorial near the Walmart where they were gunned down while shopping on a Saturday morning. Then he headed to Dayton, Ohio, to deliver another nine crosses to mark the mass shooting there.

Two massacres in 13 hours on the heels of a rampage in Gilroy, Calif., the previous weekend are keeping Zanis busy. He has built a cross for every mass-shooting fatality in the U.S. for two decades. And at Christmastime in 2016, he installed on a donated vacant lot a cross for every person who died of gun violence in Chicago that year—more than 700.

It started in 1996 when a grieving mother asked this self-employed carpenter, the son of a pastor, to build a cross to memorialize her son. He had been killed by gunfire in Aurora. Since then, Zanis has delivered crosses to the sites whose names have become litany in the U.S.: Columbine, New Town, Orlando, Parkland, Sutherland Springs, and so many more.

Zanis knows what to do after these senseless episodes. He holds up the cross. But with such violence increasingly frequent, the church has to do more than invoke the cross after a tragedy. To those who Jesus called to be peacemakers, the urgent challenge is to know what to do beforehand.

“Racism, however it is expressed, is a blasphemy against the one true God whose image all women and men bear. The idea that one race is inherently superior to another, whether it is called white supremacy or some other label, is unbiblical.”

– Jim Richards, executive director, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention

“As president of SWBTS, I want to be clear that we condemn in the strongest possible form any and all ideologies of racial/ ethnic superiority/inferiority that fuel the kind of hate evidently motivating the #ElPaso shooter to commit such a horrific act of violence in our state.”

– Adam W. Greenway, president, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

“When these manifestos outline the motive as #WhiteSupremacy, the Church CAN’T be silent in calling this out!”

– D.A. Horton, pastor, Reach Fellowship in North Long Beach, Calif.

“We are facing a very serious mental health crisis, and we now lack the cultural will and for that matter even the legal mechanisms to deal with many of these threats.”

– R. Albert Mohler Jr., president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary “Pundits will make this political, each blaming the other side’s ideology. But something bigger is happening here. It’s called evil and it’s motivated by Satan himself.”

– Greg Laurie, pastor, Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, Calif.

“Mass murder is not a ‘tragedy.’ A cyclone or an earthquake or a tornado that takes lives is a tragedy. But mass murder is evil. And if motivated by racism, it is evil compounded.”

– Roy Ortlund, pastor, Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tenn.

“I think both El Paso and Dayton represent our most recent illustrations that every person in this world needs Jesus and they need Jesus now.”

– Ronnie Floyd, president, Executive Committee, Southern Baptist Convention

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