Church receives 1,000 cranes in memory of Umpqua shooting

ROSEBURG, Ore. – About three weeks ago, First Christian Church in Roseburg received an unusual gift.

It came via Federal Express, in a package about 3 feet wide and 3 feet long, and weighing almost nothing.

Office manager Diane Welch recalls wondering what it was. They hadn’t ordered anything.

She opened it up to discover lots of pieces of colorful folded paper. Lifting a string at the top she pulled and pulled, and pulled some more. What came out was a string of 1,000 origami peace cranes – a gift from the First Congregational Church of Santa Barbara, California.

As in Roseburg, the residents of Santa Barbara know what it is like to experience a community tragedy.

Six people were murdered in May 2014, when a deranged gunman stabbed three people at his apartment before rampaging through the beach community of Isla Vista, killing three more and, finally, himself.

It’s a story that sounds all too familiar in Roseburg, a community still healing from the Oct. 1 shooting at Umpqua Community College, in which eight students and a teacher were killed by a gunman who also turned his gun on himself.

“As a community that has gone through our own journey of pain and sorrow after the shooting in Isla Vista … we stand with you in this difficult time,” the Rev. Allysa De Wolf of the Santa Barbara church wrote in a letter accompanying the cranes. “We are sending you these peace cranes as a sign and testament to our hope for peace in our world and belief that violence does not have the last word.”

The cranes have been placed and draped on top of a coat rack in the First Christian Church’s sanctuary.

“It’s so amazing that someone cares so much for our community that they would put so much work into this just so we could feel their love and prayers for peace,” Welch said.

“You can almost feel the prayers when you look at it,” Welch said. “I picture them saying a prayer with each fold.”

“It was kind of overwhelming when we received it,” said First Christian’s pastor, Daniel Mallipudi. He said he thought of all the hands and all the time it took to make them, as well as the prayers they said when they made them.

The Santa Barbara church’s gift is part of a tradition of churches supporting each other in the wake of tragedy.

De Wolf, the minister of the First Congregational Church of Santa Barbara, brought 1,000 paper cranes with her when she moved there from Newtown, Connecticut. Newtown is the city where 20 children and six staff members were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

After the community college shooting, the Santa Barbara church folded another set to send to Roseburg.

Mallipudi said the Roseburg church will send its cranes on to San Bernardino, California, where 14 people were killed in a terrorist attack.