A South Jersey rabbi who built a temple and a huge congregation on the strength of his reputation as a sensitive teacher and spiritual guide went on trial here today, accused of hiring a man to bludgeon his wife to death so he could continue an affair with a member of his congregation.
Granted, a huge congregation of weed smokers isn't a bad place to recruit people to your weed smoking cause, but it's not somewhere you're going to bring about any real kind of change.
For the breakaway Anglicans, that means eventually moving their huge congregation from a large high school gym and several other borrowed locations to a property of their own — once they find one.
His critics say that underneath his geniality and heart-on-the-sleeve spirituality lies a tougher core that may explain how he rose to the pastorship of a huge Memphis congregation of 16,000 members and twice ascended to the presidency of the denomination.
As we flew over the province of Gulu in our small Cessna, it was easy to see the hundreds of square kilometers of untended fields and empty villages, and huge congregations of tightly packed mud huts that huddle around armed forces bases to which the farmers have retreated.
"Deferred maintenance is a huge problem for congregations," said Jeffrey Gonyeau of Historic Boston, a preservation group that runs the Steeples Project, which works to maintain Boston's historic houses of worship.
Faith leaders and the beliefs they instil in their congregations, have a huge impact on people's decisions about HIV treatment, as well as influencing HIV prevention.
A huge underground car park offers the congregation an instant earthly reward after the snarled city streets.
Surrounded by security guards, Mr. Saeed, 63, a stocky man with a huge, untrimmed beard, spoke for 50 minutes to a rapt congregation that sat on the wide lawns of the Qadisiyyah Center in central Lahore.
Tickets for the High Holy Days are "a huge issue," said Amichai Lau-Lavie, the spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, a roving congregation in New York known for its use of the arts.
In December, the pastor of a fledgling storefront church in Red Hook, Brooklyn, began spreading word among several dozen evangelical Christian congregations that he was hiring employees for a huge new social service program.
