Relying on More Than Prayer

"I schedule these officers every week," said Rose Lyda, facilities administrator at New Life, which employs perhaps 200 people, all trained with preventive safety in mind.

"We're trained as staff to look directly into people's eyes, and to let people know that you see them," Lyda said.

But even some church staff members have been taken aback when informed in meetings that "so-and-so is packing," she said. "They say, 'Oh!' " The plainclothes security are typically volunteers such as Assam, who on Sunday morning read online reports of the Saturday shooting at the Youth With a Mission campus in suburban Arvada and noted that New Life also hosts a branch of the missionary group.

Others at the church had noted the report and agreed that additional volunteers should be on hand for both services.

Officials at several large churches emphasized that security for a house of worship requires careful calibrating what allows members to feel they are safe without undermining the reason people come to church.

"You don't want a fortress," Smith said.

At the same time, the institutions exist as clearinghouses for the kinds of personal strife that can spiral into conflict, such as child custody disputes. And offerings can run into serious cash, especially at the estimated 1,200 churches nationwide that draw more than 2,000 people to a single service.

Their members say the dramatic growth of evangelical megachurches reflects a yearning for community in suburbs defined in some ways by the clean, cold lines of the New Life complex. The landscape around Denver -- from Columbine to Englewood, where police carried a computer out of Murray's home -- shines with handsome new buildings that stand apart from one another, often like the people working inside.

"Initially, these megachurches, because of the way they're built, they look like a reinforcement of the atomization, the alienation of modern life. But inside it's different, because of the way people relate. It feels good in there," said Patton Dodd, who worshiped at New Life from 1993 until last year.

Now an editor at Beliefnet.com, Dodd wrote a book about becoming Christian in a church so big he could venture in feeling the comfort of anonymity and be welcomed by its small groups when he felt ready. At New Life, the "Core: What Really Matters" catalogue fills 70 pages, listing groups from "Original Existence Fantasy Football" to "Calling all Cowgirls!"

"And these are your neighbors," said Lyda, "not the people you live next to and pull out of your driveway seeing."

Dodd said the security apparatus at New Life worked as smoothly as the rest of the enterprise, alive with bustling good cheer just two days after the shooting. As the Rev. Brady Boyd spoke to reporters, receptionists informed callers that the Wonderland "family Christmas spectacular" was off, replaced by a special prayer service.

"For all of the corporatization and consumerization of megachurches, the good part of it is, like corporations, they try to create something that meets needs," Dodd said.

"But it doesn't work for everyone, obviously. It didn't work for Matthew Murray."

Staff writer Hamil R. Harris in Washington contributed to this report.