Ahlul Bayt News Agency, Gainesville, Florida -- Twenty religious leaders representing three faiths and a number of denominations stood together on the steps of Gainesville’s City Hall at noon Thursday as a show of solidarity against a small church that has commanded worldwide attention for its plan to burn the Quran on Sept. 11.
Muslim, Christian and Jewish clergy members and religious leaders emphatically denounced the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center and its senior pastor, Terry Jones, whose plan to burn copies of the Muslim holy book on the church’s front lawn has sparked promises of violence.
Larry Reimer, the minister the United Church of Gainesville, said the city is in the “center of a spiritual storm” and called for area residents to rally around Muslims “in a time when so much venom is directed toward them.”
Looking at the few dozen people gathered in front of City Hall, Saeed Khan, a past president of the Muslim Association of North Central Florida, said he was glad to see the community coming together.
“More than 30 years ago, we as a family – me and my wife – decided to settle here,” said Khan, a professor of pathology at the University of Florida. “Looking back, looking at all of you, looking at how Gainesville is responding to this, we made an excellent choice.”
The Rev. Milford Lewis Griner, the pastor at Hall Chapel United Methodist Church in Rochelle, gave what was one of the more rousing addresses, calling for the community to “rise up with boldness and swift determination and show forth love, peace and understanding at this time in our history.”
“Let it be declared,” Griner continued, “that we stood together and spoke and prayed as one community and collectively became a new biblical David that brought down a new and threatening Goliath with a spiritual stone of humanity.”
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