ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- This was only Janine Nitterauer's second time in the pulpit and her mind went blank when she finished reading from St. Paul's Letter to the Romans.

Father Bill McLoughlin guided her to the liturgy's next line. "The Word of the Lord," he said. "Thanks be to God," responded the congregation.

"I knew there was something I was supposed to say," said Nitterauer, laughing. Several friends offered hugs as she returned to her folding chair in the Church of the Resurrection's temporary sanctuary.

Welcome to the cutting edge of American church life, where it's getting harder to tell the players without an up-to-date program and people are constantly learning new roles.

Until recently, the 80 or so members of this mission, including their priest, were part of an historic parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina. Others were Baptists, Pentecostals or, like Nitterauer, simply unchurched. Now they are part of the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a hard-to-label flock that was born in 1992 and already has 120 congregations -- more than half of them missions.

One easy way to create fog is to bring together clashing fronts of lawyers and theologians.

The soup got thick this week in Wilmington, Del., site of the heresy trial of Bishop Walter Righter, who stands accused of violating his vows by ordaining a noncelibate gay man.

While homosexual issues took center stage, this complex trial pivots on another question: Does the Episcopal Church have a doctrine that says sex outside of marriage is sin? Today, this question leads directly to another: Will the Episcopal Church change its rites to allow same-sex marriages?

A verdict is probably weeks away. A conviction is almost unthinkable since at least four of the nine bishops on the court have performed or openly endorsed ordinations such as the one Righter performed.

The church establishment, led by Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning, backs the gay cause and Righter recently added evidence of this fact. At the time he performed the controversial 1990 ordination of Barry Stopfel, Righter already was retired and assisting Newark Bishop John "Jack" Spong, the Episcopal left's clearest voice. Why did Righter perform the rite?

"Jack and the presiding bishop agreed it was better for Jack not to ordain Barry ... because (Spong) was a lightning rod for controversy, and I was kind of a safe person from Iowa," Righter told Religion News Service.

For years, Nashville has sort of played for Southern Baptists the role that Rome plays for Roman Catholics.

The pastor of Nashville's 175-year-old First Baptist Church doesn't just lead a tall-steeple church -- he fills a symbolic role in America's largest non-Catholic flock. So it raised eyebrows at Nashville's "Baptist Vatican" when the news spread that the Rev. Dan Francis was leaving his 2,400-member church to start a mission.

"The senior pastor of a First Baptist church isn't supposed to go build a new church from scratch," he admitted.

That wasn't all. This suburban mission in booming Brentwood will be "seeker-friendly," using interactive media, pop music, film and drama. And while the mission committee hasn't chosen a name, it has decided that the sign out front will not say "Baptist."

"That was never an issue," said Francis. "We're just not going to put words like `Southern Baptist' in our name. We don't want to set up that kind of denominational barrier. That would only keep us from reaching unchurched people."

As the late Southern humorist Grady Nutt always said, you know you're in Baptist country when the preachers pronounce "dance" with four syllables -- as in "daaah-E-unce-uh!"

Nutt was a graduate of Baylor University, so he knew all about hot-button issues in the Bible Belt. It seems like every few years, journalists can count on the world's largest Southern Baptist university to make headlines linked to drinking, dancing, sex or all of the above.

Naturally, a recent chapel announcement that Baylor would begin holding on-campus dances was big news. The ban was mostly symbolic, since students have for years danced at university-approved "functions" elsewhere in Waco, Texas. Still, conservative critics cited the decision as new evidence of moral decay.

It's sad, even tragic, that these issues get so much ink, said philosopher David Solomon, a 1964 Baylor graduate who teaches at Notre Dame University. While some folks yelp about dancing, Baylor's leaders have for years been engaged in a high-stakes debate about a serious issue -- what it means to be a "Baptist," or even a "Christian," university. Similar arguments rage behind the scenes on hundreds of campuses.

The agenda for next week's Promise Keepers clergy conference ends with a tiny note saying the "schedule is subject to change."

That's interesting, since the agenda for the Atlanta gathering is sketchy to begin with. It opens with a Tuesday session on "Hope for the Church," ends with "Renewing Our Call" on Thursday and, in between, leaves organizers lots of room to maneuver. The program doesn't even nail down who speaks when.

Strangest of all, Wednesday night is wide open. This is not standard operating procedure when a group expects to draw more than 40,000 men into the expensive confines of the Georgia Dome.

Perhaps there will be a bonus session on a topic that emerges early in the conference, said the Rev. Dale Schlafer, who leads the surging movement's work with clergy. Then again, something more volatile may happen, something along the lines of the dusk-to-dawn marathons of confession and repentance that swept many college and seminary campuses last year.

"I'm not trying to evade the question, but we just don't know," he said. "We've been trying to picture what we could do with 40,000 guys in a dome. How can we let pastors say what they need to say? How can we handle this in a responsible way?"

It wasn't a firestorm, but British newspapers recently found a subject hot enough to compete with the Royal Family's sex life.

"Hell hath no fury any more," said the Observer, responding to a Church of England report that included modernized language on heaven, hell and damnation. Another London headline said, "We believe in Hell, says the Church (but without the flames)."

While "The Mystery of Salvation" does reject "universalism," the belief that everyone goes to heaven, it suggests that those who choose to reject God face eternal death, not eternal punishment. In other words, if hell exists, it's empty.

"In the past the imagery of hell-fire and eternal torment and punishment ... has been used to frighten men and women," says the report. "Christians have professed appalling theologies which made God into a sadistic monster. ... Hell is not eternal torment, but is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to God so completely ... that the only end is total non-being."

Amid the tumult surrounding Super Bowl XXX, Americans will congregate to party, pray, swear, chant, eat, drink and bond.

They will wear symbolic clothes, attend public rites, recall heroic deeds, consult oracles, hand down traditions and spend -- or risk -- millions of dollars. It's easy to see why many researchers now consider Super Sunday a pseudo-religious holiday.

"The Super Bowl combines all the elements that America has always valued the most. It's a ritual that glorifies physical excellence, determination, religious fervor and a military style," said Robert Higgs, author of "God in the Stadium," which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. "All of this is focused on a quest for the dollar and success. ... It somehow seems symbolic and sad that it all takes place on a sacred day."

Hours before the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an ABC News colleague brought Peter Jennings a copy of "The Jewish Mourners Book of Why."

"I found the explanation of Jewish burial so fascinating that I incorporated a good deal of it into my funeral commentary," said the veteran anchorman, in a recent address at Harvard University's Divinity School. "If my mail is a guide, the audience much appreciated it. Contrary to what many news executives have believed in the past, news of the soul is very much news."

It's been two years since Jennings raised eyebrows in major television newsrooms -- including his own -- by deciding that religion was worthy of full-time coverage by a journalist trained to handle this complex and powerful subject.

People still ask why he did it. The answer, obviously, begins with Jennings' work in the Middle East, Russia, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and in the American South during the civil rights era. And in 1992, he said ABC crews kept returning from trips to Middle America with "this gnawing feeling that we were missing something if we didn't talk to people about the effect that their religious beliefs might have on their presidential choice."

For the first half of the 1990s, Father Christopher Moore spent most of his Sunday mornings guest preaching in parishes across New Jersey.

Each week, he stood in another pulpit, gazing at another set of Episcopalians in another set of pews. He quickly spotted trends.

"I found an incredible similarity from church to church, even from service to service. It seemed like I kept seeing the same 20 people at 8 o'clock and the same 100 people at 10 o'clock," said Moore, who served as the Trenton-based Diocese of New Jersey's communications director. Today, he leads a parish in Pennsylvania.

Eventually, Moore made a master list of unspoken assumptions that governed life in these parishes, whether people knew it or not. His conclusions will disturb some leaders in the oldline Protestant churches that have struggled to reach new members and fulfill old missions in a changing culture.