Texas church shooting survivors gather for memorial, funerals

A memorial to a victim of the Texas church shooting

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

last updated 12 November 2017

Members of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the site of last week's church shooting that killed 26 people, will gather with hundreds of mourners Sunday for an outdoor memorial service. The church building, which may soon be demolished, is open as a memorial site with 26 empty chairs.

Funerals for several of the victims were held over the past few days, as was a special Veterans Day ceremony on Saturday, as nearly half of those killed had ties to the Air Force. "Maybe," said county Judge Richard Jackson at the Veterans Day event, "this will start the healing process that will get Sutherland Springs and Wilson County to put this horrific tragedy behind us and look to the future."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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