c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Four months after a deranged gunman burst into their church and killed seven people at a youth rally, members of a Texas church are still stricken with grief, but feel an avalanche of prayers and good wishes in 20,000 e-mails that poured in within weeks of the shooting, its pastor said here.

“I really think Wedgwood Baptist Church may be the most prayed-for church in the history of the church,” said the Rev. Al Meredith in an interview after an evangelism conference at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary last week.

“E-mail spread our story all over the globe,” he said. And the Internet was the medium that rained expressions of support on the 2,500-member church from all over the world.

Life at Wedgwood in Fort Worth was shattered last September when Larry Gene Ashbrook, 47, heavily armed and screaming insults at Baptist life, rushed into the sanctuary and began shooting adults and teen-agers gathered there for a youth rally.

Within minutes he had killed seven people and wounded seven more.

He then took a seat in a back pew and shot himself in the head.

In the weeks after the shooting, church members covered the walls with thousands of messages, papering the Southern Baptist church and its ancillary buildings with words of hope and condolences from thousands of strangers, Meredith said.

They included letters from other Christian denominations as far away as South Africa, and from Muslims and Jews, Meredith said.

And there were prayers from Jewish families at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, where a month earlier another gunman had burst in, wounding three children and two adults. A member of a white supremacist group was later arrested and charged in the attack.

Since the September shooting at Wedgwood, “Our church still has a wonderful spirit of celebration. But individually people are struggling, and I don’t want to minimize their grief,” Meredith said.

“Post-traumatic stress syndrome is real, believe it,” he said. “People you think are doing fine, a car backfires and they break down in tears. Some teen-agers haven’t been able to sleep without nightmares waking them up.”

One woman who escaped unhurt from the church with her daughter that night was hospitalized with depression over the holidays, he said.

Since the shooting, many church members have turned to professional counseling and to each other in services that have remained in the sanctuary where the shootings occurred.

“The church now is a place where you can cry,” and where members are still occasionally ambushed by sudden gusts of grief, Meredith said.

Last week, Meredith, Wedgwood’s pastor for 12 years, sensed that some people still badly shaken were intimidated by the public testimonies of those farther along in their own healing process.

“Last week I asked people who were still wounded emotionally to stand so we could pray for them. And lots did.

“That’s healthy. That’s reality, that’s facing the grief, and asking the people of God to pray for you,” he said.

“We are all the body of Christ. The body cares, it accepts people whether they are weakening under pressure and having to live on Prozac to make it through the day,” Meredith said. “We don’t have to hide anything from one another; we accept one another at whatever stage of grief we’re at.

“People ask me how we are doing. I tell them, `We’re getting through because people are praying for us.”’

DEA END NOLAN