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KILLEEN?A couple of Southern Baptist congregations near Fort Hood served as rallying places for the community and offered messages of hope the Sunday following the shooting Nov. 5 that left 12 soldiers and one civilian and an unborn child dead. In the days following, Army chaplains, Southern Baptists among them, consoled the grieving and the injured.
“[W]e just tried to present a message of hope. We are people of hope because of the resurrection of Christ,” said Ken Cavey, pastor of Memorial Baptist Church, located just three miles from the main gate of Fort Hood in Killeen.
“I approached it (during services Nov. 8) as this being a storm. When Jesus sent the disciples across the lake in Matthew 14, the storm came up suddenly. Not only did we address the storm of the Fort Hood situation, but there were some folks there that have storms in their marriage, storms in their finances. The storms will never end, but God has given us provision for how to operate within the storm,” Cavey said.
Memorial Baptist was one of the first churches to respond to the tragedy, hosting a prayer vigil and a session addressing spiritual questions just a few hours after the shooting. The question people have asked most, Cavey said, is “Why would God let this happen?”
Cavey said about 75 percent of Memorial Baptist’s active members are connected in some way to the military, and he estimated that 2 or 3 percent of those who attended the church on Sunday were first-time visitors who came because of the Fort Hood shooting.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry spoke at a community memorial service at First Baptist Church in Killeen, exhorting mourners to embrace their faith community during the trial. He reminded them that the tendency during tragedy is to recoil from fellowship with others, but the author of the book of Hebrews says not to give up meeting together.
After the service, Cavey said, a Southern Baptist chaplain approached him to express gratitude for the support he and his colleagues are receiving from pastors and church members as the chaplains minister to soldiers and their families.
As of Nov. 13, the alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was stable after being shot four times in the abdomen, according to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. He was charged with 13 counts of murder with a decision pending on further charges related to the unborn baby of a slain soldier three months pregnant.
The tragedy began Nov. 5 when Hasan, an Army psychiatrist scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan, walked into a Soldier Readiness Center and opened fire, killing 14 people, including the unborn baby of a pregnant soldier, and injuring dozens more.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, I.-Conn., said on Nov. 8 he would begin an investigation into what the Army should have known about Hasan before the shooting, the Associated Press reported. Among other reports, former classmates of Hasan complained to faculty about what they considered to be Hasan’s anti-American views, including a presentation that justified suicide bombings as well as his remarks that Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution.
Hasan reportedly cried out “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest!”) as he fired rounds from two semi-automatic pistols.
Meanwhile, Army Chief of Staff George Case
