SPRINGFIELD, Mass.

As Election Night made way for a new day, a pastor named Bryant Robinson Jr. clicked off his television to accept a sleep of sweet promise. His mostly black congregation now had two blessings awaiting it in 2009: the inauguration of the first African-American president and the finished construction of a new church.

Give praise.

He could not have been asleep two hours before his telephone rang. It was his brother Andrew, whose home abuts the blessed construction site. “They’re burning our church,” shouted Andrew Robinson, who still doesn’t know why he said “they.”

Soon Bishop Bryant Robinson, pastor of the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, was standing at the grassy edge, as firefighters sprayed arcs of water meant not to save the building but to contain a fire clearly set. Black embers the size of fists shot skyward, only to float down like broken pieces of the cold New England night.

Someone eased him into a chair  he is 71, with bad knees and high blood pressure  and placed a blanket around his weary shoulders. He stayed there past dawn, when this new day’s light revealed a smoldering test of faith: a skeleton of scorched steel and a cracked foundation upon which a church could no longer be built.