I am larry's son-in-law. I have been there through all of this and I as a person and a member of the family am outraged with the way NLC handled this. Instead of calling him him at some point in time throughout the week and saying "Hey Larry can you sit this one out" they did nothing until Sunday moring. How do I know this you ask per his request I had the mans phone the whole entire week. I have feilded calls from the media, his friends and family. Oddly enough I go through my notes and nothing from new life. I destincly remember make several calls to new life so Larry could talk to someone in the leadership. Not once did any of our messages get returned.I know it is their side, so I am interested in hearing what the Church has to say...but I have to say, what Tobias relates sure sounds bad for the church. Unless there is something more (and there could be), along the lines of what I posted in my last response, it sure stinks to high heaven what they are doing to this man.
Monday night he went to the church and was acosted by a deacon. The deacon said "At this time of hightened security we would appriciate it if you didn't say anything bad about the security staff." which larry refused to lie about what happed. The deacon then grabbed larry's left arm (the one he got shot in) and prceeded to yell at him. That was the last contact larry had with church until sunday morning.
Larry is a good christian and as a good christian he attends not only the services but sunday school before hand. He showed up early, as he does every Sunday, and spoke to his friends and went through the whole entire class with no interuption. At the end he walked to the sanctuary to attend the services. Before the man even had an oppertunity to sit down 13 men including 2 members of the colorado springs police department(there only by the reqeust of the leadership)man handled him out of the building.
I ask you do think that it should take 13 men to escort a calm 59 year old man outside? my answer.. absolutely not. Particularly a 59 year old man who had been shot a weeek before. As for the theory of larry being not asked to come. It's kinda hard to ask someone not to come if you don't talk to them. in fact if asked not to come he wouldn't have. We could have gone to another church. Since we felt part of the healing proccess was going back to the place where everything happened, we went to church. At this point we are 98% sure that the church's reasoning was because they din't want larry to belittle the security that day. Which at no point in time has he ever doneand will he ever do. In all of the interveiws he gave not once did he he say anything negative to/about the 2 security gaurds. Mearly that he was unarmed and they weren't shooting so he thought of something else that help distract him long enough for Ms. Assam to do what she did. I also revert to the interviews adn in every single one he praised Jeanne for being brave and doing what she did.
The point is that why would you kick a hero out of church. Better yet why would you kick a christian out of church? As of right now we may never find out. Pastor Brady Boyd says he's been trying to call but no calls have come through. Will this be the same of trying to come to an amicable resolution? We will just have to wait and see.
The family only means to display its disgust for the church and the way they handled things. At no point in time do we want CSPD to catch any flack about this. They were mearly doing as the land owner asked for which we thank them for doing their jobs.
The leadership of the Church doesn’t seem to be passing this “Test”, or at least the PR part of it.
Perhaps, and this is the only reason I can think of, they don’t want future potential shooters, God forbid, to think their security guards won’t act in times of crisis.
Maybe we’ll hear from Jeanne soon.
While I can certainly understand your point about Bourbonnais being treated in a less-than-Christian manner, it is also easy to see that this highly emotional event has supercharged the atmosphere for the leadership. Personally, I must admit I am biased and have a hard time being as gracious as I should when I read the less-than-literate perspective presented by Tobias. Add in Bourbonnais' imprudent actions (riding to the sound of guns when he didn't have one, breaking the First Rule of a Gunfight: bring a gun) and words (criticizing those who followed the rules) and the family begins to appear a few fries short of a Happy Meal, IMO. I have a suspicion that Bourbonnais has posed other challenges for church leadership and this put him over the line of their tolerance level.
I thought what they had to say was that what Bourbonnais did was more of a problem than a help... Since the only reasonably detailed description of what happened came from Bourbonnais, I can't find much reason to side with the church....