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Bishop mourns fatal police violence, calls for justice, grace, love

January 31, 2023 | Racial Justice, Journey of Hope, GNJ News

Bishop John Schol expressed in a letter to EPA & GNJ United Methodists Saturday the anguish many felt when viewing the video of Tyre Nichols being brutally and fatally beaten by Memphis, Tenn., police officers. “It was painful to watch,” he wrote. “The death of Tyre Nichols has no redemptive value. Even God cried.”

The bishop commended Nichols’ parents for their “witness to all that is good in humanity,” speaking of “their pain, their love of their son, and a call for justice.” He decried the fear, rage, violence and brutality that too often reverberates in “our human story” but “must always be condemned.”

Schol called on United Methodists to uplift “the best in God’s creation—grace and love,” to pray for Nichols’ family and their city, and, in the words of Micah 6:8, to “seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.”  Read the letter.