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"I smell the presence of Satan" | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Most of Columbine's student body is drawn from unincorporated Jefferson County, well west of Littleton and farther afield from Denver, where the gently rolling hills suddenly give way to the Rocky Mountain foothills, rising up like a great barren wall. Travel west three miles from Columbine, to where the strip malls and subdivisions drop away, and three new, modern megachurches rise up from the prairie, dominating the terrain on the edge of what feels like the end of the inhabited world: West Bowles Community Church, Centennial Community Church, and Foothills Bible Church, as far from Denver as the mountains will physically allow. They've joined a host of older community facilities, like Trinity Christian Center, and Southern Gables Church just west of Columbine, where pastor Jerry Nelson leads a loose association of 33 evangelical churches, known informally as the Southwest Metro Denver Area Pastors. Trinity's services were actually conducted at Columbine High until three years ago, as were West Bowles' in the mid-1980s. Low-tech Trinity Christian, housed in a converted Kmart, is the most working class of the bunch, and it's an outpost of old-time religion, with an active but comparatively small membership that's deeply engaged with the church. The newer evangelical churches tend to be more refined, professional and market-savvy. On the opposite end of Littleton, South Suburban Christian Church exemplifies a national trend of marketing to different demographic groups by a single church. The moderately evangelical congregation, which is home to Dylan Klebold's prom date, offers four different Sunday services, targeted to four distinct market niches. The most traditional service features a liturgy appealing to straying Catholics and Lutherans, while "Hiz Place" caters to Gen-Xers gathered around tables with espressos. "You wouldn't recognize it as church," beams pastor Deral Schrom. In the first days after the Columbine shootings, local religious leaders were a model of civility, setting aside differences and welcoming one another into their services. By nightfall on the day of the shootings, 35 local churches had united into an ad hoc union called the "Clergy Coalition on Scene," to work together to calm their shattered community. Three evangelical ministers from a distant suburb, free of the baggage of local religious politics, and the needs of a terrorized congregation, were deputized as leaders. They organized regular meetings to coordinate clerical response and discuss boundaries of good behavior. There was general agreement that this was no time for proselytizing to shell-shocked students. "They weren't ready to be preached to, but they were ready to pray," said the Rev. Aaron Jamal, the African-American minister who headed the Coalition and later spoke at Isaiah Shoels' funeral. A few ministers brought booklets and Bibles -- the assorted "paraphernalia" of proselytizing -- to the grief sessions, but Jamal politely asked them to put them away. "They were well-intentioned, but off the mark," he said. "It does absolutely no good to throw a bunch of paraphernalia at someone who doesn't understand what it has to do with what they're going through." It was clear that faith was invaluable to many hardest hit by the tragedy. On the afternoon of the shooting, reporters were cleared out of Leawood Elementary School before victims' parents were notified, but Red Cross volunteer Lyn Duff witnessed the scene firsthand. Duff, who is Jewish, was moved by the reaction of the evangelical families to their loss. "It was like 180 degrees from where everybody else was," she said. "They were singing; they were praying; they were comforting the other parents, especially the parents of Isaiah [Shoels]. They were thinking a lot about the other parents, the other families, and responding a lot to other peoples' needs. They were definitely in pain, and you could see the pain in their eyes, but they were very confident of where their kids were. They were at peace with it. It was like they were a living example of their faith." But early rumblings of a conflict began to emerge with within hours of the tragedy, playing out far from public view. Barb Lotze, youth pastor at Light of the World, a local Catholic church, hosted a huge prayer service for students, and found herself grappling with competing challenges of good taste, religious opportunism and the spirit of working together with fellow clergy. She was struck by the necessity for inclusion as she watched students, parents and townspeople from a host of different faiths pour into her pews. Midway through the service, an eager young minister from another denomination approached her excitedly about an "altar call." Altar calls are a foreign concept to Catholics and mainline Protestants, but a key feature of evangelical worship, the ritual commonly referred to as being "born again." Lotze was torn, but agreed in the spirit of inclusion. The young man rushed to the altar and proclaimed his love for Jesus Christ, and asked who was ready to come forward and accept him as their own personal savior. No one moved, Loetze said. "Nobody?" the young man asked in astonishment. At that, young people began to leave the church. "The kids are not ready if they don't know Christ to come at this point," she said. "They just want to be hugged, they want to be loved, told that we're going to get through this together." Most Protestants agreed with Lotze, including some evangelicals. "I think it would be crass to have an overt invitation," said Jeffrey Marchant, a local resident and director of legislative and cultural affairs for Focus on the Family. "Most genuine Christians would probably not be interested in something opportunistic like that. I wouldn't." But others saw the killings as a God-given marketing opportunity, a chance to save souls. The Rev. Oudemolen of Foothills Bible Church, for instance, told his congregation that the parents of victim John Robert Tomlin requested he make John's funeral "an evangelistic service," including "an invitation" to be born again. "What an incredible opportunity," Oudemolen said, "not only here, but through the live [television] feed that we had."
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