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Charleston shooting shakes locals, who reflect

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When the Rev. Kymberley Clemons-Jones stood at the pulpit of Valley Stream Presbyterian Church on June 21, four days after nine people were shot and killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., she kept an eye on the door at the back of the sanctuary.

“Are we living in a different place now, where we have to watch who comes in?” she said. “It makes us have conversations with our board, our elders, that we never thought we’d be having.”

Clemons-Jones was ordained in the AME church in 2005, only recently transferring her ministerial credentials to an area presbytery of the Presbyterian Church USA. She used to serve at St. Matthews AME Church in Jamaica, Queens, with a parishioner whose sister was among the victims. She has several good friends who knew the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. She said that in the AME church community, everyone has some connection to everyone else, from church to church and from state to state.

“I cried, I cried and I cried,” she said of when she heard about the attack. She started feeling like she should avoid looking at her Facebook page, “because I knew that someone else was going to be crying out that their mother or cousin or somebody was there.”

Last Sunday, Clemons-Jones addressed the tragedy in the context of the frequent accounts of violence reported in the news, from acts of terror to abuses of authority by police officers, to domestic violence and youth-on-youth violence. She preached that the necessary reaction is to confront one’s own fears about other people.

“We must lay down fear, we must lay down pride, and we must lay down our perceived omnipotence,” she said. “For the Lord says, ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,’ but fools despise wisdom and discipline, Amen.”

She challenged her congregants to look to their children as examples. “Most of our youth that are here today have friends who don’t look anything like them,” she said. “They have different cultures, different economic backgrounds, different languages, even different outlooks on life, but yet there is still a general respect between them that unites them, and that’s until their parents get in the way and teach them the ‘right’ way.”

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