The Rev. Al Meredith was more than 700 miles away when a gunman walked into an Illinois church and gunned down the preacher as the congregation watched in horror. But the tragedy hit the Texas preacher hard, and he's coming to help.
A decade ago, another gunman unleashed a hail of bullets and a pipe bomb at Meredith's church, killing seven people and wounding seven others before calmly sitting in a back pew and shooting himself in the head.
On Sunday, services are scheduled to resume at First Baptist Church in the St. Louis suburb, one week after authorities say Terry Sedlacek shot senior pastor Fred Winters through the heart. Meredith was invited to be the guest preacher, hoping he can draw on his experience to ease the misery at First Baptist.
He opened Sunday's early service by apologizing that he was not "Pastor Fred."
Meredith recounted how his church was the scene of an attack in 1999.
He said First Baptist may never get over what happened, but should use the tragedy for spiritual outreach.
"I don't have three points and a poem on how to deal with tragedy. I don't have any magic formula on how to emerge triumphantly," he told The Associated Press by telephone from Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, two days before leaving for Illinois.
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"If out of our tragedy God can use that give hope and help to others, then it's not worthless. It's redemptive."
In an earlier interview, Meredith said Sunday's sermon would be heavy with hope -- the same kind he says his congregants, called "Wedgies" -- needed after Larry Gene Ashbrook's one-man, eight-minute massacre.
It was Sept. 15, 1999, just five months after the Columbine High School killings in Colorado, and Wedgwood was holding a community youth rally for "See You at the Pole" day, a national event in which teens pray around their school flagpoles.
The music was thumping when 47-year-old Ashbrook walked in with two guns, 200 rounds of ammunition and a pipe bomb in his pockets. He seemed angry, witnesses said, and asked about the service before he opened fire at a group sitting in the lobby.
He kept shooting as he walked down the hall and into the sanctuary filled with several hundred people, cursing and yelling as he emptied clip after clip of bullets. He rolled his bomb down the aisle before killing himself.
Four of the dead were teenagers and the others ranged in age from 23 to 36.
Within days, Wedgwood was on the mend. The bloodstained pews were replaced, and bullet holes that riddled the hallways were patched. Four days after the gunfire, the church held its regular Sunday service in the sanctuary.
"The prince of darkness wanted to stop this church, but I didn't want to give him an inch," Meredith said then. "We were not going to let this stop us."
Some 20,000 cards and letters poured in to Wedgwood. So did 13,000 e-mails that "wallpapered" church hallways for weeks "so that when you walked through the church you could just feel the support and prayers from people around the world," he recalled.
Few reminders of that dark time remain other than a granite memorial outside Wedgwood's main entrance. The octagon landmark includes pictures of those killed and their favorite scripture verse.
Tests found no evidence of alcohol or drugs in Ashbrook's system. Investigators said they could only guess why Ashbrook targeted a church several miles from his house, and the suggestion was that he was mentally ill.
In Maryville, no obvious motive has emerged in the attack. Investigators say Sedlacek arrived at the church March 8 packing a .45-caliber handgun and enough bullets to perhaps kill 30 people. He also brought a knife.
Authorities say Sedlacek calmly walked down the aisle and fired once in Winters' direction, the bullet clipping the preacher's Bible and sending pieces of it spraying like confetti in what some of the 150 onlookers thought at first was a skit.
Instead, Sedlacek allegedly fired three more times and the only bullet that found its target was the one that killed the pastor. After Sedlacek's gun jammed, police say, he pulled out the knife and wrestled with two congregants who subdued him. All three were wounded.
Investigators say they later found in Sedlacek's bedroom two 12-gauge shotguns, a rifle and a box of 550 .22-caliber bullets, along with an index card marked "Last Day Will" and a planner that singled out that Sunday as "death day."
Prosecutors have charged Sedlacek, 27, with first-degree murder and aggravated battery. He is jailed without bond.
A day after the shooting, Sedlacek's attorney told the Belleville News-Democrat that his client has deteriorated both mentally and physically since contracting Lyme disease, a tick-borne ailment.
It remains unclear whether Sedlacek even knew Winters, a married 45-year-old father of two who led First Baptist for 22 years -- one more year than the 62-year-old Meredith's tenure at Wedgwood.
"We have no idea what this guy's motives were," Mark Jones, an associate pastor at First Baptist, said of Sedlacek. "We don't know if we'll ever know that."
Since Winters' death, his congregation has closed ranks and opted to grieve privately. Journalists were allowed to cover Winters' funeral Friday but were barred from talking to anyone at the scene.
"Some people say, `Don't cry, he's in a better place.' That's horse manure," Meredith said. "It's like telling a man with a broken leg not to walk with a limp. Nor does God command us to do that."
Members of both churches, he says, should take solace in that outsiders have been blamed in both attacks.
"People say, `Are you over it yet? No, we'll never get over this. And neither will Maryville," he said. "But you get through it. That's the good news. You'll get through it."
