Faith, Fear and the Wages of Columbine

How do you preside over the funeral of a 17-year-old boy who went to school one Tuesday morning and, with his good buddy Eric Harris, massacred 13 people just for fun? Dylan Klebold helped perpetrate one of the bloodiest school shootings in history, indelibly etching the name "Columbine" into our collective memories. Yet the Rev. Don Marxhausen believed that Dylan's parents deserved to hear the message of God's grace. And so when a desperate Tom Klebold phoned, the pastor—a liberal-minded Lutheran—agreed to arrange a private service. This decision has haunted him ever since. In his sermon, Marxhausen spoke of God's love. "God, who knows about suffering and pain and loss, wants to reach out to you," he told the grieving parents, according to news accounts. As he preached, Marxhausen could see Dylan, laid out before him in an open coffin. A small mountain of beanie babies was piled around the boy's head, covering the self-administered wound that killed him. It was Saturday, four days after the shootings.

Two days later, another Littleton, Colo., pastor presided over another funeral. Cassie Bernall, a Columbine junior, had been shot in cold blood as she crouched under a library table, and word was that in her final seconds she answered her murderer's question and affirmed her belief in God. More than 2,500 people flooded the sanctuary of West Bowles Community Church, where Cassie had been a member. During his sermon, George Kirsten proclaimed Cassie a martyr. "This is Cassie's graduation day," he began. Over the next 10 years, Kirsten's persistent evangelicalism would make him the target of accusations that he was exploiting a tragedy. A Navy pilot in Vietnam, Kirsten had seen horrors. Columbine would open the floodgates of Kirsten's memory. He wrestles with those memories to this day.

God was everywhere after Columbine. The images come rushing back: the homemade white crosses that studded the small hill overlooking the school; the memorial services for 12 dead children and a beloved teacher that looped endlessly on television. Littleton was ground zero for the kind of white, evangelical Christianity that was sweeping the country at the time. The clean-cut, grieving classmates of the fallen tried to make sense of what was senseless. On the front lines, though, Littleton's pastors did not have the luxury of interpretation. Marxhausen and Kirsten (and their colleagues) were engaged in spiritual triage, tending to hundreds of traumatized families. Ten years later, these two men of God—radically different in personality and theological approach—are still struggling to deal with the damage done to them by two boys bent on murder and mayhem.

Marxhausen, now nearly 70, is a burly, plain-spoken man who arrived in Littleton in 1990, and built St. Philip Lutheran Church into a thriving, mainline congregation with more than 1,000 members. Marxhausen believes firmly in a loving, forgiving God and a nuanced approach to questions of salvation. After Columbine, local evangelicals—who said the shootings were the devil's work and who used the tragedy as an opportunity to bring people to Jesus—infuriated him. On the Sunday between Dylan's funeral and Cassie's, 70,000 mourners gathered in a parking lot to listen to Franklin Graham, among others, proclaim the gospel. Marxhausen hated the whole thing. "Franklin Graham was beating me up through my TV," he says. "I turned it off."

Still, Marxhausen might have survived the Columbine tragedy with his job intact were it not for his continued relationship with the Klebolds—and his very public support of them. After Dylan's funeral, he described the killer's parents as "the loneliest people on the planet" to The Denver Post. "That's where I think I started getting in trouble with my church," says Marxhausen. "I was becoming somewhat toxic with my visibility and extrovertedness."

Exhausted by the tragedy, Marxhausen took a three-month sabbatical. "You absorb everyone else's pain, and after a while that catches up to you, big time." Still, he concedes, he left when his church needed him most. When he came back in September, "it was clear this wasn't my church anymore," he says.

George Kirsten was in Israel on the day of the shootings; immediately, he turned around to come home. He had performed the marriage of Misty and Brad Bernall in 1980; more recently, he had helped guide their teenage daughter Cassie through a dark and rebellious time. Two days before the shooting, Cassie had recorded a video of herself testifying to her faith in Christ. (It was shown at her funeral.) The West Bowles congregation filled the Bernall's living room the week after April 20, praying and crying and praying some more. Kirsten was there for all of it. "What I remember most is this tremendous barrage of very hurting people," he says.