Church missions target New England

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By Jay Lindsay ASSOCIATED PRESS

WATERTOWN, Mass.

It's hard to tell in the quiet of a color-splashed autumn morning, but Redeemer Fellowship Church is trying to set its roots in a rough neighborhood. For churches, anyway. Until this new church opened last month, the 19th-century Congregational Church building in suburban Watertown was empty for nearly two years. Across the street, a closed Baptist church is filled with condos. So is a former Catholic church half a mile away.

Dead churches are a familiar story in New England, which recent surveys indicate is now the least religious region in the country. But some see opportunity in a place where America's Christian faith laid its roots.

"You look at this area, and it's a great area of potential. It's a great area of need," said Redeemer Fellowship pastor Chris Bass, a Houston native.

Several Christian denominations see New England as a "mission field" - a term often associated with unchurched, foreign lands. As they evangelize and work to plant new churches, they speak of possibility, but also frustration. The area's highly educated population is skeptical and often indifferent to their faith.

"About once every hour, I give up. It's tough, man," said a half-joking Joe Souza, a Southern Baptist missionary working north of Boston.

Trinity College's American Religious Identification Survey released this year showed New England overtaking the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region in the country. Twenty-two percent of respondents here said they have no religious faith of any kind, the highest in the country.

In a Gallup poll this year, all six New England states were in the Top 10 least religious in the country, with Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts claiming the top four spots.

New England's religious apathy has developed over decades, but it's striking where the Pilgrims landed seeking religious freedom and where the great 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards helped spark the First Great Awakening. Stately churches near town centers all over the region are reminders of the central importance religion once held.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut do host the nation's heaviest concentration of Catholics, but those numbers have dropped substantially. In 1990, 50 percent of New England residents identified themselves as Catholic; by 2008, it dropped to 36 percent following the clergy sex abuse scandal in Boston, according to the American Religious Identification Survey 2008.

Several groups trying to re-ignite New England's faith are theologically conservative, such as Southern Baptists, the Presbyterian Church in America and the Conservative Baptists' Mission Northeast. They say a reason for the region's hollowed-out faith is a pervasive theology that departs from traditional biblical interpretation on issues such as the divinity of Jesus, homosexuality and the exclusivity of Christianity as a path to salvation.

The Rev. Wes Pastor, head of the NETS Institute for Church Planting in Williston, Vt., said New England's liberal mainline denominations, such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church, have been practicing a "different religion."

"I'm not saying it to be snooty, but they have a different belief system and that belief system ... is a profound departure from historic Christianity," said Mr. Pastor, whose group trained Mr. Bass and supports his Baptist church.

The Rev. Paul Nickerson, a church-planting specialist at the United Church of Christ's Massachusetts Conference, said local churches have declined because of a creeping insularity, not because "we're theologically inept." Progressive churches that refocus on the needs of the un churched are growing, he said.

"The depiction that all the mainliners have lost the Bible, and are too progressive, and so conservatives have to come in and reclaim the territory, I don't buy that kind of stereotype," he said.

Theological differences aside, there's broad agreement that New England churches need to better serve people outside their walls and build the relationships that attract people to faith.

It's not easy among busy New Englanders who protect their time. Many lack even a basic knowledge of church life that's culturally ingrained elsewhere, said the Rev. Doug Warren of Christ the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Portland, Maine, which he helped plant in 2001.

"They didn't grow up going to church, their parents didn't grow up going to church and, in many cases, their grandparents didn't grow up going to church," he said.

That means outreach must be deliberate and personal. Mr. Souza and his associate pastor, Celio Freitas, helped start a public youth soccer league in Boston to meet people. Their witness, they hope, leads to curiosity about the faith that guides their lives, and perhaps a visit to Celebration Church, which began meeting in a Saugus office building in January.

Mr. Warren said the Presbyterian Church in America plants 50 churches a year, but has started just 10 since the mid-1990s in northern New England.