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Church urges community involvement to halt violence

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – A local Indianapolis church gathered to support violence victims after crime continues to claim lives.

The Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church used dance and song to highlight its overarching message, which is: What can I do? Church attendees said people need to get more involved to help children, and the city as a whole, combat crime.

“Save our youth,” begged Lateef Griffin, who helped organize the Save Our Youth concert. “We all got to stand up and do something.”

“Our youth need us; they need our help. They need our time, our resources and our prayers,” Tihesia Jones said to the congregation.

They say their challenge is to take this message to the streets.

“It should give us awareness that we have a lot of work to do inside the church, outside the church,” said Pastor Kevin D. Long. “Too often times we stay inside the walls and think that this cannot affect us, but it does.”

“It’s our job to take care of each other. It’s our job to take care of the youth. It’s our job to instill some good values like our mothers and fathers did,” Griffin said.

The concert comes as the city tops 40 homicides for the year, including three just on Sunday. While they say we need to be aware of the violence around us, we also have to be aware of the good things.

“All of our kids are not doing bad stuff, and in spite of that we’ve got to do some things positively and retroactively and proactively too, so we can reach kids before they get on the other side of the law,” Long said.

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