Churches

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.

Far from the gay-rights battlefields of Los Angeles and San Francisco, where supporters of a ban on gay marriage risk business boycotts and landing on the social D-list, a Baptist church in Montana has scored a quiet victory in its campaign to keep its books and defense-of-marriage backers out of the limelight.

To those who know it only by reputation, the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts is a forbidding place, plagued by violence and poverty and ruled by African American gangs. So naturally, Father Peter Banks brought 200 Latino parishioners there in December for a posada, a Christmas ritual that re-creates Joseph and Mary's search for a place for Jesus to be born. Banks, pastor of St.

In a small room above the crowds of Terminal 2, the Rev. Michael G. Zaniolo prepared to deliver his airport version of Mass. In other churches it can take an hour or more. But as an American Airlines pilot strode into the chapel with his luggage, Zaniolo was ready to deliver it a bit quicker -- 30 minutes or less. His homily, a thoughtful sermon with messages of hope, was whittled to 1 minute, 46 seconds. "People have to rock and roll," said Zaniolo, a 50-year-old Catholic priest.

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.