Church embraces youths who tried to carjack pastor

Posted on Mon, Feb. 12, 2007
Associated Press

COLUMBUS, Ohio - ... Calaway, 15, and Gaines, 14, tried to take Colopy's car Oct. 13 in the church's parking lot as he returned from a wedding-rehearsal dinner. The boys' 17-year-old cousin Perry Ellis IV is accused of putting a BB gun to Colopy's head and demanding his car keys. When they couldn't drive Colopy's car because it had a standard transmission, they took parishioner Linda Fuhr's car instead ...

The robbery scared and angered community members and parishioners, but also sparked discussions about forgiveness. When Calaway and Gaines appeared, somber and remorseful, in Franklin County Juvenile Court and admitted to a delinquency charge of second-degree robbery, Colopy's anger dissipated. He urged Magistrate Cynthia Sours-Morehart to make the boys do work for the church and issue an apology in front of the congregation.

Sours-Morehart took the priest's recommendation and ordered the boys to perform 80 hours of community service at the church and talk to the church members, rather than issue a standard letter of apology ...

"They're not monsters, they're not pariahs, they're just kids who made a bad decision," pastoral council president Wesley Fullen said ...

http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news/state/16682834.htm

1) That the pastor had a car with a standard shift transmission, and

2) The judge ordered the boys to perform 80 hours of community service at the church.

I mean the story sounds good on the surface.... and it is a story about Christian values and forgiveness and such....

But how does the "community" benefit from their service when they've essentially been bound over into indentured servitude for 80 hours to a church? Would the judge have done this if they'd have to work at a mosque? A Buddhist Temple? Or even better, The Church of Satan???

And about the stick-shift transmission: most preachers I know drive Caddies or Buicks. They don't make those with stick-shifts now do they?
:shrug:

{this post was written with tongue firmly in-cheek}

Yeah, they forgot to learn how to drive properly before they stole a car. I find the story of the stick-shift quite funny.

It's stories like that that remind me to keep my own propensity to stereotype and denigrate entire groups in check.