The Rev. William S. Epps, 42, will...

The Rev. William S. Epps, 42, will officially begin his pastorate Sunday at Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, ending that congregation’s long quest for a senior pastor to succeed the Rev. Thomas Kilgore, now pastor emeritus.

Kilgore, a well-known black community leader, relinquished the pulpit he held for 22 years at the end of 1985 to the Rev. Otis Moss Jr. of Cleveland. But Second Baptist had hardly announced his arrival when Moss was persuaded by his Cleveland congregation to return, forcing the search committee to begin anew.

Epps, who accepted the church’s call, was pastor of Second Baptist Church of Detroit for the last four years and before that pastored First Baptist Church of Winston-Salem, N.C.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was an assistant at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and served for a while on the congressional staff of the late Adam Clayton Powell. In those New York years, he earned a master of divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary and a master of education degree at Columbia University.

This year, he completed his doctor of ministry degree in theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.

Epps said he has no preconceived goals for Second Baptist, a 1,600-member church affiliated with both the Progressive National Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches. “I will meet with people, listen to their needs and concerns, and our programs should grow out of that,” he said.

PEOPLE

Bishop Nelson W. Trout, though not elected a bishop in the merger-born Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, has been picked as one of 12 executives for the Chicago-based denomination’s Division for Outreach. Trout, who since 1983 has headed the old American Lutheran Church regional district based in Woodland Hills, will develop training programs and theological rationale for missions of the division. In another announcement, Fran Burnford, one of Trout’s assistants, was named associate director of the denomination’s Commission for Church in Society.

Sister Mary Glennon, a graduate of Immaculate Heart College who taught for more than 30 years at Catholic schools in Downey and Norwalk, has been named by Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony as the archdiocese’s first vicar for women religious. Her duties begin Jan. 1. A member of the Sisters of the Holy Faith, Glennon is currently principal of her order’s school in Arabi, La. She was one of three finalists whose names were submitted to the archbishop by the Sisters Council. A chancery spokesman said the number of sisters in the three-county archdiocese is probably between 2,200 and 2,500 and that the new vicar’s office will seek to arrive at a precise count.

DATES

A conference called “Visions of Peace” at Pasadena’s All Saints Episcopal Church from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. today features author-priest Matthew Fox, All Saints Rector George Regas and the Rev. Peggy Bassett, senior minister of the large Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science, who recently returned from a visit to the Soviet Union.

Father J. Bryan Hehir, a leading spokesman for the U.S. Catholic bishops on social and foreign policy concerns, will lecture at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Mount St. Mary’s Doheny Campus in downtown Los Angeles. Hehir will talk about the bishops’ 1986 economic pastoral letter. Hehir recently announced that he will leave Jan. 1 as the bishops’ secretary for social development and world peace to teach and write full time at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

Actress Jill Ireland will talk about her success in fighting cancer; Patti Lewis, ex-wife of comedian Jerry Lewis, will tell how she survived divorce and founded LADIES (Life After Divorce Is Eventually Sane), and Marabel Morgan will give marriage-saving advice of the sort she espoused in “The Total Woman,” a 1973 book that some say was the forerunner of a religious, counter-feminist movement. The three are part of “Women’s Day Extraordinaire” at the Crystal Cathedral Congregation in Garden Grove next Saturday from 8:15 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.