Churches

One Sunday in March, a man strode down the aisle of the First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill., pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and fired at the pastor. The Rev. Fred Winters deflected the first bullet with his Bible, sending bits of it into the air like confetti. But the next three rounds hit Winters, killing him.

The people of St. Luke's Anglican Church have called their La Crescenta parish home for 85 years. Generations of families have grown up within its historic stone walls. On Sunday, Father Rob Holman will deliver his final sermon there, an epitaph to a bruising legal fight the congregation waged and lost to practice its conservative brand of Christian theology and hold on to the church. On Monday, St. Luke's leaders will hand over its keys to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

After nearly 20 years on an impersonal commercial strip, the Cathedral of Christ the King moved to a quiet residential neighborhood in the northwestern edge of this metropolis. Church leaders were eager to be part of a community. Then, on Palm Sunday 2008, they started ringing the church bells every half hour during the day. The complaints soon began, so church leaders cut back the tolling to once per hour. They put up Styrofoam to muffle the sound.

On his medical missions to Africa, Dr. Lawrence Czer has dealt with poverty, lack of electricity, bad accommodations -- and military checkpoints. In Sierra Leone, Czer and his team were sometimes stopped by rifle-toting soldiers who simply wouldn't let them through. "They'll just have you stand there and you'll see other people going through," Czer said. The medical team refused to give the soldiers any money. All they could do was try to cajole them. "Or shame them," the doctor said.

With clarinets, trumpets and tubas, the Oaxacan Echo youth band blasted its raucous music into the ceiling of St. Cecilia Catholic Church in South Los Angeles on a recent Sunday afternoon. Hector Mata, a Oaxacan immigrant, watched from the wings. St. Cecilia's was packed. That's the way it's been ever since the church began holding monthly Masses honoring the Virgin of Soledad, patron saint of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

On the Sunday in 2003 when Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. shouted "God damn America" from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ, he defined damnation as God's way of holding humanity accountable for its actions. Rattling off a litany of injustices imposed on minorities throughout the nation's history, Wright argued that God cannot be expected to bless America unless it changes for the better. Until that day, he said, God will hold the nation accountable.

While Kim Lundell was studying religion in the United States, her teenage son in South Korea drowned. His death prompted her to start a church for young Koreans in Los Angeles County. Walnut Blessing Church of the Nazarene became just that, with high school and college students making up about 70% of the roughly 100 congregants. Many are recent immigrants whose parents are divorced and work long hours at low-wage jobs. "The church is their home," Lundell said.

. -- Standing in a pulpit that inspired him in his youth, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. reminded a Baptist congregation that trouble is unavoidable but does not last forever and is not suffered alone. "I don't care what the prosperity preachers say . . . there is no such thing as a trouble-free life," Wright said in a sermon at Bank Street Memorial Baptist Church in Norfolk. Cautioning those in the audience who might repeat his words later, he added: "Don't quote Jeremiah Wright, quote Jesus."

Father Michael Pfleger's face is well known in these parts, one of the many iconoclastic characters who inhabit a city with a long history of racial division and political activism. Pfleger, a white priest who has had numerous run-ins with Chicago's Catholic archdiocese involving his political activism, mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ last weekend. As a guest speaker at Sen.

Barack Obama announced Saturday that he and his wife had resigned as members of their Chicago church in the wake of controversial remarks from its pulpit that have become a serious distraction to his presidential campaign. In a letter dated Friday to the pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, had come to the decision "with some sadness."