Pontiac Pastor organizes peaceful protest demonstration

PONTIAC, Mich. - For two days, Pastor Keyon Payton of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, watched peaceful protests transform into violent confrontations. 

"I did not want the emotions that persons were honestly and sincerely feeling to have the narrative of social justice to be hijacked by the destructive demonstrations that we are currently seeing throughout the nation," Pastor Payton said. 

He said the demonstrations he watched seemed to lack something. 

"A healthy space for the raw emotion that we know people are feeling right now to be able to come to a healthy space, where the can constructively come to release those emotions," Pastor Payton said. 

So he approached the Mayor of Pontiac with the intentions of enacting a change on how to deliver a message. 

"We're having church literally in the front of city hall the symbol of local government," he said.

And the Mayor got on board. 

"I'm for what is next, said Pontiac Mayor, Deidre Waterman. "How we bring to every community that injustice is not a part of the American fabric." 

Other people in leadership like Oakland County Executive David Coulter also supported the movement. 

"a man was murdered of the hands of somebody who was supposed to protect him and our communities," Coulter said. "We need to channel that outrage and frustration in a way that lifts up our community and fixes the systems that are broken in this country."

But Pastor Payton, the man behind the service at city hall, said he plans to make sure what he is seeing goes beyond words. 

"It's one thing to say kumbaya, but when the kumbaya is over there are real policy issues tin our communities that must change and the time is now,"