A Preacher on Trial

摘要

It began like any other service at the Bethel Metropolitan Baptist Church. On Jan. 24, dozens of congregants filed into the pews of the St. Petersburg, Fla., parish to hear their confident and charismatic preacher, the Rev. Henry J. Lyons. But something was different that morning. The normally jubilant choir offered a mournful Sam Cooke spiritual, "Jesus, Be a Fence Around Me." And when Lyons—president of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., the largest African-American religious group in the country—rose to the pulpit, he was pensive and fatalistic. There was much he wanted to say, he told the congregants, but it wasn't the time, or the place. "Right now, it's just praying time."