The United States is reeling again from another school shooting. The gut punch of feeling the profound loss of innocent life together with anger at the environment to allow such a tragedy, especially on the heels of so many other similar tragedies, doubles us over and forces us to reflect once more on who we are as a nation in the United States. Our hearts break for the grieving parents as well as for the children whose friends and own sense of safety have been lost.

In the aftermath of the event, a flurry of social media posts declared that people were praying for the situation and the people affected. These were met by posts in response that questioned what good praying would do. On Twitter, the hashtags “your God” and “shut up” trended as people pushed back on the seeming pointlessness of offering “thoughts and prayers.”

This kind of response to “thoughts and prayers” is not new. It has grown louder with each succeeding tragedy, especially related to mass shootings. After all, if God actually paid attention to the prayers, wouldn’t He stop these terrible events from happening in the first place? Moreover, what is the point of praying afterward? Is God going to raise the dead? Turn back time and avert the tragedy? Perform some other grand miracle that somehow undoes the terrible event? If not, is the prayer really anything more than just a crutch, a salve to help us get on with life and just keep living the way we always did?

And, always, there is this question posed to those who say they are praying: What are you doing about it? There is the demand that Christians work in verifiable, concrete ways to change our culture and society to bring an end to gun violence. The call for prayer might not be so hard to swallow if the Christians backed it up with something useful.

Christians are not insensible to this criticism. InterVarsity Press, the largest Christian publisher in the United States, published When Thoughts and Prayers Are Not Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Guide into the Reality of Gun Violence as a thoughtful response. The flagship evangelical periodical Christianity Today published an op-ed calling for stricter gun controls in 2018. In the aftermath of the racist grocery store shooting in Buffalo, the Rev. Pete Cook, head of the New York State Council of Churches, to rally Christian leaders to push for stronger gun laws and to challenge the complicity of white American churches in promoting white nationalism and the violence it breeds.

In short, Christians take seriously that their faith demands that they not only tend to the spiritual, but care for the standard of living and quality of life for people in the here-and-now. As I argue in Participating in Abundant Life, it is the very knowledge that God will hold us accountable for how we used our gifts to care for people in physical, tangible ways that demands we take seriously how we care for people today. I write:

Those who desire to enter eternal life not only need to have faith in Jesus Christ to receive forgiveness of sins but also need to care for the needs of others in the present world. The abundant life of the disciples of Jesus Christ is bound up in sharing God’s abundant life with others physically.

Participating in Abundant Life, pp. 144-145

I conclude the book with a lengthy appendix that offers examples of how churches can revamp their statistical forms so that they can offer concrete, verifiable metrics to demonstrate that they are improving people’s lives and not just trying to grow themselves or only address spiritual things.

All this said, it does not mean we give up on prayer. In part, it is because through prayer we are alerted to the vision of God’s perfect world. This energizes us to go be part of making this come into existence for others. Being in the presence of God through prayer prompts us to love our neighbors in ways that are meaningful to them.

Prayer is also important because it does recognize that we are dealing with something more than human power alone can address. When we face tragedy, especially when that tragedy ushers us into the presence of death, we reach an end to what human ingenuity and power can touch. We need something bigger, more powerful, than the evil, pain, and void that face us. That is the only way we can find hope.

Prayers do offer something that is not so easily quantifiable: they offer us a way to access the God of hope. The God who provides what the Bible describes as “the peace which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). This is not resignation to what happened. This is not deluding ourselves to think that it was in any way good or even acceptable. It is to say that God can meet us in the depths of the grave itself and be with us there. Prayer is to seek this deep presence of God for the people most affected. It is not a call for their conversion, just a desire for them to experience a profound peace and hope that is not possible from anything we can generate on a human level. Whether those who are most hurting ever believe God is with them or not, Christians at least cry out to God to hold them and heal them in the midst of the pain and grief, as well as for the rest of their lives.

And, at least some Christians pray for the dead themselves. Not because it is OK that they are dead, but because this is the state of things. Christians lift them before God to receive them in His mercy and to grant that life not end with this mortal body. To grant that there will be a joyful reunion with them and their loved ones in the end.

Prayer is not in place of actions that can be tracked with verifiable metrics. It is to ask God to provide healing, hope, and peace where we cannot even as we steward all that we have in this world to make certain that these tragedies do not happen again.