Having struggled for years with mental illness, Rhonda Smith felt accepted and embraced within the small, semirural church in Upper Bucks County.
Some who knew her said that Smith, 42, had stood a few weeks ago in the sanctuary of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church and had testified to the joy of finding a spiritual home there. She sang in the choir and was serving this week as a volunteer receptionist while her pastor attended a three-day retreat in Malvern.
Tragically, the church in Springfield Township was also where a gunshot to the head cut short Smith's life on Wednesday. Found at 1 p.m. by a friend who had come to clean, she later died at St. Luke's Hospital in Fountain Hill, Lehigh County.
Whether the gunshot was inflicted by an unknown assailant or by Smith's own hand remained unclear yesterday. An autopsy did not answer that question, and investigators remained tight-lipped about their ongoing inquiry.
Bucks County District Attorney Michelle Henry would confirm only that Smith died of a gunshot wound to the right side of her head, and that she had a graze-type injury on her forehead. Henry would not say whether a gun was recovered at the church.
That uncertainty did not keep about 80 mourners from gathering yesterday to pray for Smith in a service held at nearby Trinity United Church of Christ. The neighboring sanctuary was used because Smith's own church was still an active crime scene.
Her pastor, the Rev. Greg Shreaves, urged the mourners not to speculate about what had happened. Instead, he said, "I invite you to hug one another and to grieve and to mourn and to be angry" and "to know that death does not have the final victory."
Smith had suffered since at least her early 20s with bipolar disorder, said her father, Francis "Jim" Smith. She had been just weeks from obtaining a teaching degree from Bloomsburg University when she suffered "a breakdown," he said, and had to be hospitalized.
In the years since, Smith had been on medications to control the illness, her father said, but its symptoms flared often enough that she found it difficult to hold a job.
She was on medical disability at the time of her death, living alone in an apartment in Hellertown, Northampton County, he said. She never married and had no children, he said.
Smith was mourned yesterday as a loving, upbeat daughter, sister and aunt. She had two older siblings, her father said, one a brother who is returning from Afghanistan, where he is on military duty.
Church member Judy Zellner, calling Smith "my dearest friend," said Smith frequently called her for comfort and support, sometimes in the middle of the night.
"She called me every day of her life and I told her I would be with her always," Zellner said. "And I will still always be with her."
It was Zellner who discovered her friend mortally wounded the day before. Zellner said she had been in the church for only a few minutes, beginning her cleaning duties, when she found Smith and called 911.
Jim Smith waved off the notion that his daughter could have killed herself, saying that her religious beliefs would have restrained her.
"She was a strong girl. Funny. She always made me laugh," Zellner added. And while Rhonda Smith did not dwell on her mental struggles, neither did she try to conceal them.
In a letter published by the Morning Call of Allentown in November 2006, Smith had praised mental-health workers in Northampton County's human services division for their 15 years of work with her.
"Common to all of them is their desire to help the less-fortunate and show them how to live a 'normal' life," she wrote. "I would have never succeeded this far without them."
Smith also maintained a MySpace personal Web site. It features a photo of her smiling with her mother beside a Christmas tree.
The site's headline proclaims: "Dreams Do Come True If You Believe!"