Congregation Finds a Time for Healing : Disaster: A week after an Alabama church was devastated by a deadly tornado, members gather in the parking lot and comfort each other.

Thirteen- year-old Marcus Woods fidgeted in his wheelchair and shivered in the chill before dawn. He had insisted on attending Easter sunrise service at the church where he lost half his family a week earlier.

“I just wanted to be here,” he said softly.

His father, Buddy, and 9-year-old sister, Amy, were among 20 people killed when a tornado leveled the Goshen United Methodist Church during Palm Sunday services last week.

Marcus, who tried to pull his little sister out of the rubble that covered her, suffered a badly bruised right knee. His mother is still hospitalized in intensive care; she suffered a crushed pelvis and broken legs.

As much as a celebration of the holiday, Sunday’s half-hour service was an emotional reunion of tears and lengthy hugs.

About 200 people attended, sitting on folding chairs in the parking lot of the ruined church.

The Rev. Kelly Clem greeted parishioners, some for the first time since the tornado. Her dress was dark red, her lace collar white, and her bruised forehead and eyes purple and crimson.

Battered by whirling bricks, the 34-year-old pastor lost her 4-year-old daughter, Hannah, one of six children killed while waiting to participate in an Easter program.

Friends and relatives took turns hugging her and her 2-year-old girl, Sarah.

“There’s no place I’d rather be today,” she said. “We kind of need each other,” said her husband, the Rev. Dale Clem.

Kelly Clem read from the Bible and chatted over a microphone with small children. She presented the children with wrapped Easter baskets, among the many donations of money, supplies and children’s gifts that have streamed in from across the country.

The wooden cross behind her pulpit was made last week by a friend she had not seen in years, she said, and a Roman Catholic church sent four new stained glass windows that made a backdrop.

She pledged to rebuild the northeastern Alabama church, the hardest-hit site in the series of tornadoes and storms that killed at least 44 people across the Southeast.

For parishioners, the service was a confrontation with traumatic memories.

“We had a moment when we got out in the parking lot and looked at the church. I guess we had a special cry,” said Craig Rhinehart, 22, whose fiancee, Denise Parker, was on crutches because of a pelvic fracture. Two of Rhinehart’s uncles and two cousins were killed by the tornado.

“We are the Easter people,” the Rev. Robert Fannin, bishop of the North Alabama Methodist Conference, told the worshipers. “We believe that life has conquered death.”