When a verdict shocks your conscience, the first faithful move is lament: bring the wrong to God and name it plainly, without shrinking it into a request for calm. Lament in Scripture does not stay in the prayer room. It sends a Christian toward the people the verdict hurt, and then toward a public word about the system that produced it. Dr. Vince Bantu made that case while pastoring in St. Louis, in the days after a judge acquitted a white police officer in the killing of a young Black man. He made it from the streets, where he had been marching.
Bantu’s account is useful because it is specific. He describes one city, one verdict, and one set of churches, and he is candid about how those churches answered. His argument is also pointed. He holds that some Christian responses that sound faithful amount to standing at a distance.
Why did this verdict land the way it did?
The case concerned the 2011 death of Anthony Lamar Smith, shot by officer Jason Stockley after a high speed chase, and the judge’s finding that Stockley was not guilty of first degree murder. Pointing to a statement recorded during the chase and to DNA evidence on the gun, Bantu concluded that “it just seems clear to people at all levels of society that this was a clear case of murder, and yet he was let go.”
That is Bantu’s reading of the evidence. A court reached a different conclusion, and this article cannot settle the facts. The question it can examine is the one Bantu was working on: when a ruling looks to many people like a betrayal of justice, what does the church owe God and its neighbors? He also saw the case as “yet another” in a long list that had come to light in recent years, which explains the depth of the grief. People were mourning what the event seemed to confirm as well as the event itself.
Why does lament come before strategy?
For many young people in St. Louis, Bantu observed, a verdict like this becomes the breaking point: “these things become the tipping point where it’s kind of the last straw where people need to vent.” To those who doubted the point of protesting, he answered that showing up was how the church stood with people who had been beaten down.
Scripture gives that pressure somewhere to go. The psalmist prays before he is composed: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). Habakkuk addresses a breakdown of justice in his own society: “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!” (Habakkuk 1:2).
Habakkuk’s complaint even reaches the courts. He says “the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth,” and adds that “wrong judgment proceedeth” (Habakkuk 1:4). In the KJV, judgment here means justice, the kind a court is supposed to deliver, and slacked means the law has gone numb. Many modern translations render the end of the verse as justice perverted. The prophet describes a legal system that fails the righteous, and he says so to God’s face.
That is why lament comes first. It tells the truth about the wrong before anyone decides what to do, and it keeps the anger addressed to God. Habakkuk is prophetic poetry and dialogue, so it describes a faithful man’s prayer rather than issuing a procedure. What it shows is that an honest complaint about injustice, spoken to God, is an act of faith.
Isn’t a prayer service already a faithful response?
This is where Bantu’s argument cuts deepest. He affirmed that Christians need to gather and pray, and he named the citywide interfaith prayer service and the pastors’ meetings he attended. Yet he criticized “this pacified Jesus and this pacified theology” whose entire response is to hold a prayer meeting.
His evidence was vocabulary. Many churches were asking for peace. Protesters were chanting no justice, no peace. Bantu argued the church should hear something biblical in that pairing: “we have to understand the biblical concept of shalom.” Shalom, he explained, “means peace also means wholeness. It means justice.” In his account it describes things being set right. A quiet street over an unaddressed wrong has calm without that kind of peace.
The distinction exposes a weakness in some prayer services. A prayer that only asks God to keep things calm can slide into asking God to help everyone move on. Lament names the wrong and appeals to God as the judge of all the earth. The prophets hold justice and peace together: “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). Bantu’s phrase for the next step is that “we need to pray with our feet and call for systemic change.” He puts the prayer first and expects it to move people.
What does presence actually require?
Bantu had watched clergy come to the protests and stand slightly apart, testing the water with a toe. He wanted more: “I want to be there not only to hand out bottles of water and pray for people, but I wanna chant with them.”
He also drew lines. When the crowd turned to profane chants against the police, he went quiet: “I can’t get down with that.” When the chants matched what he believed, such as ending racism in the police force, he joined in. His silence on one chant and his voice on another were both visible, and both were part of his witness.
He grounded this in Paul’s approach in Acts 17. Paul, in Bantu’s telling, “didn’t sit around in the synagogue waiting for them to show up” but went to the Areopagus and engaged the Athenians where they were. Young protesters would not come to a pastors’ meeting or an interfaith service, Bantu reasoned, so the church should go to their protests and planning meetings, listen, and stand with them “in ways that are faithful to the scripture and faithful to our identity as believers.”
Presence also changed how he saw the young leaders. Many of the activists he knew, he acknowledged, lived worldly lives and wanted nothing to do with church. Still, “I don’t see them as primarily people to criticize, but more so I see them as lost children that need our guidance and need us to come alongside them.” He compared the relationship between the Black church and these movements to a strained bond between parents and children, with hurt and neglect on both sides.
Lisa Fields pressed the generational point further. She described churches where young adults gather in one congregation and older believers in another: “So you have strength with sometimes without wisdom, then you have wisdom with no strength.” Showing up at a protest begins that work. Each generation still has to supply what the other lacks over the years that follow.
Who should speak prophetically, and about what?
Bantu made a claim many readers will find uncomfortable. Most clergy he saw at the protests came from theologically liberal denominations, while churches “really strong on biblical authority and kind of biblical orthodoxy are very slow to get involved in protesting and calling for justice.” Some orthodox pastors told him they wanted solutions, not marches. He granted the point and pushed back: “We do, but we also do need to raise up our voice.”
His worry was about trust. If the only churches standing with young people do not hold to Scripture’s authority, those young people may conclude that Bible-believing churches do not care. His remedy kept orthodoxy and added a calling orthodox churches had left to others: “There’s a biblical role of prophecy in saying there is systemic racism and sin in our police force, in our judicial system that needs to just be called out.” The purpose of saying it alongside young people was to show them “the church is here for you.”
He also wanted pastors to see systems as well as individual choices. Recommending Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, he argued that churches sometimes see only violence, absent fathers and drugs in their neighborhoods. He did not deny those problems. Seeing the larger system, he argued, would lead pastors to keep discipling their people while recognizing that “we also need to start speaking truth to power.” He found a precedent in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s autobiography, where, as Bantu reads it, King faced angry young crowds in Chicago and responded by giving them roles in leading the marches.
What is the strongest case against this approach?
The serious objection concerns entanglement. Joining a movement can tie the church’s witness to claims, tactics and ideologies it cannot defend. Bantu himself described bricks thrown at the mayor’s house and windows broken during some protests, and he said he saw “so many problems” with the broader movement. A careful Christian could reasonably ask whether marching alongside it blurs the gospel.
Bantu’s answer has three parts. He described the movement as a loose network rather than one organization, so standing in the street did not mean endorsing a platform. He spoke along with what he could affirm and fell silent on what he could not. And he framed participation as faithfulness to Scripture and to Christian identity. That last point matters most. Jude 3 holds that our ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician, and Bantu’s lines in the crowd show what that allegiance looks like under pressure: it decides which words a believer will say aloud.
A second objection deserves weight. Prophetic speech makes claims about facts, and facts can be disputed. Lament can be honest even when the details are contested, because the grief is real. Public accusation carries a higher burden, and a church that speaks to a court or a police department must tell the truth as carefully as it demands truth from others. Habakkuk’s book also refuses to end with the complaint. God answers with a call to wait: “though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come” (Habakkuk 2:3). The text does not promise the next verdict will go differently. It does promise that human failure cannot cancel God’s justice.
Where does lament lead after the protests end?
Bantu turned the question inward. He acknowledged that white supremacy is real and that white churches have their own work, which he called a whole other conversation. He chose to examine the Black church’s own house.
He described congregations in North St. Louis where most leaders and members live elsewhere, drive in on Sunday and leave by noon, while most neighborhood residents do not attend. He named a class divide between a Black middle class that runs many churches and poor neighbors rarely brought into leadership. And he noted that adults from 18 to 35, the group most missing from the churches he knew, were the ones holding the bullhorns at the marches.
These are one pastor’s observations about his city, and he named exceptions himself. He pointed to young pastors filling churches with people in their twenties, and to a merged congregation of older and younger believers that opened its building to protesters on the first night of unrest.
That merged church shows where lament leads. Its members grieved the verdict, and on the night the protests began they unlocked a hundred-year-old building for the people in the streets. Bantu framed the church’s task as two questions: can it go into the spaces where young people are grieving and be present, and can it make its own home open both to someone coming in off the street and to someone ready to lead? A lament that names the wrong in the courtroom has to answer those questions in the congregation, in who gets a key to the building and who gets a voice in its leadership.