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Every year at Christmas, my daughter, Sarah, asks me what I want. And every year my answer is simple: peace, love and world happiness.

Sarah thinks I?m joking when I give her this answer because her next question is, 'No, Dad. What do you really want?'

But I am serious. What I want for Christmas every year is peace, love and world happiness; it?s what I pray for. No kidding.

So it was with that hope and prayer in mind that I began the New Year 2006. We had been up late on Dec. 31 with our annual bonfire and fireworks celebration, which this time had been grander than ever.

I was basking in that peaceful spirit of family, friends and New Year well into Jan. 2, when, sitting in my brother?s living room in Midland, Mich., I was flipping through the channels looking for some news. The item that leapt off the screen was a simple headline story from MSNBC: a church in Bel Air, Maryland, had been the victim of an armed robbery during its worship service. No one was hurt. That?s all the report said.

Knowing that we have a large and growing United Methodist presence in Bel Air, the knot in my stomach quickly formed for fear that this had happened in one of our churches.

I dashed to my computer and went to the Baltimore Sun?s Web site. My fears were confirmed. It was one of ours. So much for peaceful feelings in 2006.

I made some phone calls and checked some e-mails and found out what had happened. As Melissa Lauber?s story on page one of this issue points out, around 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 1, a masked man wearing dark clothes entered the sanctuary of Mount Zion UMC. He had a gun and he began waving it around. He ordered three brothers, ages 6, 8 and 11, and their father to collect purses and wallets.

The church?s pastor, the Rev. Craig McLaughlin, was the model of pastoral leadership while the

robber was in the church.

'He had to be desperate to be waving a gun at children,' he said to Lauber. McLaughlin was sitting in the front pew of the church when the robber came in. He said he prayed in those moments that the congregation would remain quiet and calm.

They did.

'I was thinking of the Scripture passage, ?The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church,?' he said. 'Evil will not stop people from serving God.'

That last quote has been ringing in my ears ever since I first read it. Evil isn?t hard to find, after all, especially if you?re talking about the violence, the gun fire, the people killing people, that is happening right in our own communities. And it appears very few people care.

For evidence I offer some recent headlines from the Baltimore Sun: 'Stem cell politics on tap'; 'Black Hawk crashes in Iraq, killing 12'; 'FBI agents? work faulted.'

All those headlines appeared on the front page.

Here are some other headlines from the Baltimore Sun: 'Police arrest man in Owings Mills killing'; '2 bodies found in quiet area near Arbutus Middle School.'

These headlines were found on page 3 of section B. In other words, they were buried.

I?m not picking on the Sun; this is standard practice for most major daily newspapers. And that?s the problem. Violence has become so non-news as to make it non-front page news. Unless a person is well-known or the numbers of people killed are unusual (i.e. more than one and ponder that thought for a moment), we don?t read about the killings unless we search and search hard.

Local TV and radio seems to do a better job of bringing these horrid incidents to the fore, but then they are faced with the criticism, 'If it bleeds, it leads.' Seems you can?t win.

Sure, no one likes to be doused with the reality of death, destruction and mayhem every day. We hear the stories and grow numb from the repetitiveness.

Every once in a while something breaks through that numbness and causes us to sit up and take notice. The robbery at Mount Zion broke through for me; it caused me to stop and think.

An e-mail I received today offers one response to the violence that happened at Mount Zion: lock the doors during worship.

Now I know that many churches have buzzers and cameras and security systems that would prevent all but the most determined criminal from entering. But do we really want to lock the doors on Sunday morning?

I say no. No because part of being a disciple ? part of being on the Discipleship Adventure ? is service: service to others, service to the community, service in the name of Jesus Christ. In the midst of all this bad news, all this violence in our own backyard, how do faithful disciples of Jesus Christ respond?

The Rev. Barry Hidey, pastor of the Bel Air UMC nearby Mount Zion, said in another e-mail that his answer is for churches to take precautions like training ushers in security procedures and asking church members to leave valuables at home. Bishop John R. Schol encouraged local churches in an e-mail just hours after the incident to review their own security measures.

Obviously, this situation is to be taken seriously. But lock the doors?

Again, the Rev. Hidey: 'The best defense against harm is to have a busy, active church, filled with people who talk to others and meet and talk with people they do not know.'

In other words, a church on the Discipleship Adventure.