When the Rev. Rosalyn Crosby arrived at Adams Chapel AME Church in Northwest Baltimore, well before the service she would lead Sunday, she came across a disturbing sight. A man she didn’t know stood in the half-stairwell beside the entrance, limbs shaking and eyes glassed over.
“He’d obviously taken some drugs,” the faith leader said. “I told him, ‘You need to get out of here because I don’t want you to O.D. in this hole. I’m not going to be digging you out of this hole when everyone’s coming to church. And he left. He went on down the street.”
Such encounters are not unusual at Adams Chapel. The building stands yards away from a stretch of Garrison Boulevard long known as a haunt for prostitution. Residents say drug dealers and homeless people have flooded the neighborhood in recent years, with many congregating on the AME church grounds and on the litter-strewn property of an abandoned United Methodist church across the street. A man was shot to death Thursday night in the church’s front yard.
Houses of worship across the country face similar problems. The Watchman, an Indiana-based firm that specializes in training church security teams, keeps a database of crimes committed on or near church grounds in the U.S. dating to 2017. The site links to dozens of news accounts of shootings, stabbings, armed robberies and assaults in and around churches.
The Family Research Council, a nonprofit evangelical think tank based in Washington, D.C., released a report this year that documented 915 crimes committed against churches in the U.S. between 2018 and 2023. They included more than 700 acts of vandalism, 135 attempts at arson, 32 bomb threats and 22 gun-related offenses. The 436 hostile incidents it cited in 2023 were more than double the previous year’s total.
Pathological behavior
The trend has made itself felt in Baltimore. In November 2021, an assailant robbed and pistol-whipped the pastor of St. Leo’s Catholic Church blocks away from his Little Italy church. Days later, another attacker killed a beloved member of Southern Baptist Church in Broadway East, in one of the church’s bathrooms. And in May, a pastor shot a 59-year-old man police say was burglarizing a vacant church building on South Mount Street in South Baltimore. The place had been home to the Praise Cathedral Pentecostal Church.
“What happened at Adams Chapel is indicative of what’s going on all around the country and has been going on for quite some time,” said the Rev. Rodney Hudson, the pastor of Ames United Methodist Church in Sandtown-Winchester and Metropolitan UMC in Harlem Park, both West Baltimore communities long plagued by high crime rates. “There’s no respect for human life, for the sanctity of houses of worship or for community. I believe all of this is related to how our society has surrendered all sense of morality in this time we live in.”
Bishop Donte L. Hickman, the senior pastor at Southern Baptist, had to help his community grieve and deal with the senseless killing of his congregant, 69-year-old Evelyn Player, on church property nearly four years ago. He agrees with Hudson, though he also feels the very presence of houses of worship can attract certain bad actors.
Crimes in and around churches show that “illogical and pathological behavior have no regard or reverence for safe spaces and sanctuaries,” Hickman said. And he believes that “in many instances, evil spirits love to mar and make irrelevant places of hope, faith and love [in order] to effectively oppress communities.”
Unstable surroundings
Drive past Adams Chapel just about any time of day and you’re likely to spot people going in or out of the stairwell, where neighbors said non-residents can be seen using drugs, engaging in sex acts and relieving themselves, even on Sunday mornings.
Crosby has empathy, as she said many are trapped in self-destructive cycles and lack the strength to pull themselves out. She often can be seen chatting with the “people on the steps,” as some call them, inviting them in for water or food and politely asking them to clean up after themselves.
But the unstable surroundings leave her on the horns of a dilemma that affects many American faith leaders in neighborhoods afflicted by crime: how to serve the “least and the lost,” as Jesus exhorts Christians to do, while also ensuring the safety and well-being of congregants who want to attend services and take part in church life.
Horatio Rice, a trustee at Adams Chapel who grew up in the neighborhood, said he must walk through the crowds of people when he stops by the church to keep the property clean.
“We’re trying to make this a safe space for the neighbors and for the congregation, but also for the people on the steps who want to come in and get help,” he said. “And our church is conducive to that. But you can’t have that when people are scared to come in here.”
Rice agreed with Crosby that it would be unfair to assume, at this stage, that any of the “regulars” outside the church had anything to do with the shooting, which took place on a triangle of grass behind the large white welcome sign out front, according to police. But their presence doesn’t help.
“When you’ve got people who are using drugs, who are mentally ill, and you have prostitution all around you, you don’t know what might jump off,” he says. “Anything can come along with it. There’s a safety factor involved.”
Reaching out
Some in the church security field tell clients not to worry about any contradiction between the Biblical admonition to love one’s neighbor and the need to keep the worship environment safe. The Watchman, for example, cites the Old Testament’s Book of Nehemiah.
“Don’t be afraid of them,” it reads. “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your families, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.”
In real life, though, the calls can be more complicated. Crosby said that while some Adams Chapel leaders, including Rice, have reached out to Baltimore police to request a stronger patrol presence in the neighborhood, she has never called police to deal with loiterers. Hudson and Hickman also said they do so only in rare cases. Both said their first responsibility is to work with people beyond the church walls to establish relationships of mutual trust and build from there.
The first thing Hudson noticed upon taking over at Ames UMC, he recalled, was that drug dealers regularly plied their trade up and down the block. Since then he has made it a mission to talk daily with neighbors, including the dealers, learning their stories and sharing his. His churches hold sidewalk prayer sessions, sponsor food and clothing drives, and team with local business leaders and other church congregations to provide housing, financial support, and educational, recreational and workforce-development opportunities for nearby residents.
Drug dealers have moved their business elsewhere, he said, and the Sandtown community recently celebrated an unusual milestone — 200 days without a murder.
The neighborhoods are not without their dangers. Hudson recalled the day a community member was trying to sell shoes at the same time the church was giving shoes to the needy. Hudson politely but firmly asked the man to leave, but he returned with a gun, pointed it at the pastor’s face and threatened to kill him.
Hudson said he called police, officers arrested the assailant, and the man later apologized. But he doesn’t see such incidents as the norm.
“When you make the consistent effort to build relationships, as people gain respect for the faith community, they generally police themselves,” he said.
A need for help
Many in the Adams Chapel community — an area sandwiched between the Dorchester and Ashburton neighborhoods in Northwest Baltimore — say they feel for the men and women who hang around the church and surrounding areas.
“The problems have gotten worse, but we’re not here to point a finger; we’re here to help,” said Pearl Whiting, an Edmondson Village resident who has been a member of the church since its founding in 1982.
Like Whiting, Paulette Simmons attended the service Sunday, an event that drew about 40 of the church’s roughly 70 members.
Simmons, 54, who grew up in a house directly across Egerton Road, said nearly everyone in the neighborhood has lived there for at least 30 years, and she believes dealers and loiterers have settled on the area because the elderly offer less pushback.
Simmons, who is rehabilitating the house after a fire, said people overdosing within view is a common sight and she has suffered multiple thefts and break-ins. One day in January, workers even arrived to find a dead man on her back porch “with his headphones around his neck and his coat on.”
“It was like, ‘What is happening?’ Things have gotten terrible,” she said.
Rice is one who has taken some action. Appearing at a town hall held by Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley last year, he asked for police to make their presence felt in the area, even if only by stationing cruisers in the streets on occasion. But he and others say squad cars rarely come through.
“I don’t know why, with all this stuff going on, they don’t even look at it,” he said.
Crosby said she remains optimistic, one reason she said the church plans to hold a community social on the grounds at 11 a.m. Saturday. And Sunday’s service was an uplifting affair.
A choir sang “Joys are Flowing Like a River.” An assistant pastor, the Rev. Dr. Linda Payne, led a prayer for a “shield of protection” around the church. And in her sermon, the Rev. Sharon Derricks, a church member, reminded the flock that as hard as the situation can be, “those people out there are somebody’s mother, somebody’s father, somebody’s friend.
“They are — we are — the temple of the Lord,” she said, and the crowd cried “Hallelujah!”
