A Mennonite church in Englewood, Colorado has partnered with blacksmiths in the community to help deal with the problem of gun violence by turning weapons into garden tools.
The Beloved Community Mennonite Church has started to accept gun donations from members of the community so that the weapons can be stripped down to raw materials and be re-purposed into tools.
The church's pastor said that the campaign was inspired by a passage from the Bible. "They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks," Pastor Vern Rempel said, reading from Isaiah 2:4.
Mike Martin and his father Fred have set up their workshop in the front lawn of their church to transform the guns collected by the church into new tools.
"A large part of the gun is being re-purposed into something that can be creatively used to feed people rather than something that is destructive to other people," Fred Martin said, as reported by CBS Local.
Mike Martin, the executive director of the Colorado Springs-based non-profit RAWtools, started learning about blacksmithing after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
"I hesitate to call myself a blacksmith now. I'm very much in an apprentice stage or a learner's stage or I'd still be in the 101 class, I guess," Mike Martin said, according to 9 News.
Cole Chandler, a co-pastor of the church, reportedly invited the duo from their home in Colorado Springs to Englewood to help with the campaign.
The church had already collected two rifles that Mike Martin says can be turned into as many as six garden tools.
On Sunday afternoon, Rempel and members of the church gathered outside to watch Mike Martin and his father transform the weapons into tools.
"Mennonites historically have been those who don't go to war and seek other pathways for conflict," Rempel said.
The pastor noted that the church does not expect to end gun violence with the campaign, but it is hoping that it will start conversations that will address the issue. "We are part of just a large movement of peacemaking in the world," he added.
Similar gun donation campaigns have been launched in the wake of recent mass shootings in the U.S. In Indiana, a church to offered exchange $100 gift cards for semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity clips following the Parkland school shooting.
David and Sheridan Hadley, members of the Wabash Avenue Presbyterian Church in Crawfordsville, launched the gun buy-back campaign so that the donated weapons can be melted down at a nearby steel company for safe disposal.
