Clergy

Nearly five years after replacing a legendary pastor in one of the nation's most prominent African American pulpits, the Rev. John J. Hunter counts his blessings. Since taking the helm of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles in October 2004, Hunter says, he has been privileged to bring 3,000 new souls to Jesus. He and his staff have launched such new community services as a summer enrichment program for children deprived of summer school by budget cuts.

She remembers being about 4 and, as her father worked in his study that doubled as a bedroom, hearing a knock on the front door. She answered and a tearful woman said, "Is the pastor here?" It was one of Sheila Schuller's first realizations that their small house in Garden Grove was also a sanctuary.

Episcopal Church leaders in Los Angeles on Sunday nominated two openly gay priests as bishops, becoming one of the first dioceses in the national church to test a controversial new policy that lifted a de facto ban on homosexuals in the ordained hierarchy. The nominations of the Rev. John L. Kirkley of San Francisco and the Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool of Baltimore are likely to further inflame theological conservatives in the U.S.

Who could have foreseen what would happen between the Mormon filmmaker and the lesbian priest? Not Douglas Hunter, even after he took a leap of faith and trained his camera on the Rev. Susan Russell. And maybe not even Russell, who had undergone a remarkable transformation from onetime suburban soccer mom to priest and outspoken champion of gay rights.

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.

American Muslims have never been much of a presence in the Los Angeles Police Department, accounting for less than 1% of its nearly 10,000 officers. But now, with department leaders eager to improve relationships with local Muslims, top brass have named the force's first Islamic chaplain: a Pakistani-born spiritual leader who has spent much of the last decade trying to build bridges between law enforcement and Los Angeles County's diverse Muslim communities.

Leaders of the Episcopal Church, gathering in Anaheim for their first national convention in three years, reopened fractious debate this week over whether to authorize marriage rites for same-sex couples and to repeal a de facto ban on the consecration of gay bishops. The issues have caused painful divisions in the 2.1-million-member denomination, which in recent years has seen dozens of parishes and four conservative dioceses, including one in Central California, break away.

In the midst of a global recession, religious leaders are looking beyond the recent regulatory fixes and bailouts aimed at repairing an ailing financial system. They are questioning the underlying assumptions of a market economy that they say has lost its moral bearings. Last week, Pope Benedict XVI issued an encyclical, a papal pronouncement, that decries the divide between rich and poor.

For nearly 23 years, Lisa Larges has sought to become a Presbyterian minister, but she has twice been formally rejected because of a long-standing ban on gay ordination by the Presbyterian Church USA. But in what appears to be the first national test of a 2006 policy change by the church, Larges, of San Francisco, has moved a step closer to joining the clergy.

Three siblings who say they were molested as children by the same Los Angeles priest filed new allegations of abuse this week against a worldwide religious order, which is the only Roman Catholic organization involved in the 6-year-old clergy scandal that has yet to settle any civil claims. The three allege the Salesian Society, with 16,000 priests, ignored clear signs that Father Titian Miani was a dangerous pedophile.