Church taking risk, trimmed tree from biblical land (5)
I believe the answer is:
cedar
'church taking risk' is the definition.
Although both the answer and definition are singular nouns, I cannot understand how they can define each other.
'trimmed tree from biblical land' is the wordplay.
'trimmed' means to look at the middle letters (the edge letters are trimmed off).
'tree' becomes 'acer' (acer is a type of tree).
'from' says to put letters next to each other.
'biblical land' becomes 'dar' (I am not sure about this - if you are sure you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
The middle of 'acer' is 'ce'.
'ce'+'dar'='CEDAR'
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for cedar that I've seen before include "representative of Lebanon?" , "Tall conifer" , "Tree (Lebanese?)" , "Raced around noble tree" , "Cypress-like tree" .)