Satanic vandals desecrate church in LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa.

LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. - The doors of Wakefield Bible Church used to stay unlocked for anyone who wanted to stop inside and pray.But Tuesday night, vandals entered the small brick church along Route 222 in Fulton Township, desecrating several pictures of Jesus Christ and spray painting satanic and anti-religion slogans and symbols on the walls.The vandals ripped Christ's face out of one picture, church members said, and put nails through his eyes in another."God is dead" was spray painted in large silver letters in the sanctuary, and similar slogans were written in marker on the walls throughout the small church. The vandals also ripped apart and spray painted Bibles and hymn books, church members said today, knocked items off the shelves and set fire to a hymnal on the pulpit.Luckily the Rev. Phillip Towles, the church's pastor, lives next door, and his two teenage children spotted the intruders inside the church shortly after 11 p.m. and woke their parents.Towles went over to the church, frightening the intruders, who ran out a back door. He extinguished the fire before it spread and could cause further damage."God took care of it," Kim Wagner, a church trustee, said this morning. "God preserved it for some reason. We were fortunate, it could have been a pile of ash today." The damage to the walls and storage areas can be repaired with paint and the effort of cleaning crews, Wagner said, but the three desecrated pictures of Christ had special meaning to the church members. One picture, which hangs in the front of the sanctuary and depicts a praying Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, was defaced and off-kilter this morning."I was married in that church 40 years ago, and nothing like this has ever happened," Wagner said this morning as he waited for troopers from the state police forensic unit to come and collect evidence.Towles' wife, Joanna, said she and her husband had been in the church praying around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday night and then returned home to go to sleep. Their 17-year-old daughter, Jo Beth, was still awake and had been doing homework, Mrs. Towles said, when she noticed the lights on inside the church and saw someone walking through the sanctuary.About the same time, their 14-year-old son, Jimmy, got up for a drink of water and also saw the intruders.The children woke their parents, and their father took a flashlight and went over to the church."He went over and opened the door," Mrs. Towles said. "He asked what they were doing. The lights were all on. The girl screamed and the boy ran out the side door."Mrs. Towles said the vandals took a large candle from the front of the sanctuary, piled up some Christmas decorations and ignited the hymnal on the pulpit. "It's amazing it didn't all go up," Mrs. Towles said. "The whole church could have gone down."The sanctuary smelled like smoke, but the pulpit appeared to be undamaged.State troopers arrived and searched the surrounding fields for about an hour, Mrs. Towles said, but did not locate the suspects. "It was raining and you could smell skunks in the pasture," she said.State police Sgt. Doug Burig said today the vandalism falls into the categories of hate crimes and desecration of venerated objects, increasing the seriousness of the crime.He asked that anyone with information about the incident call state police in Lancaster at 666-3742.