Out of the cold

Churches try to fill region's void

It’s hard to tell in the quiet of a color-splashed autumn morning, but Redeemer Fellowship Church is trying to set roots in a rough neighborhood. For churches, anyway.

Until this new church opened last month, its 19th-century Congregational church building in suburban Watertown was empty for almost two years. Just across the street, a closed Baptist church is filled with condos as is a former Catholic church a half 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 the Rev. Chris Bass, Redeemer Fellowship’s pastor and 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, the denominations’ members speak of possibility, but also frustration. The area’s highly educated population is skeptical and often indifferent to faith.

“About once every hour, I give up. It’s tough, man,” Joe Souza, a Southern Baptist missionary working north of Boston, said half-jokingly. “It’s like, you found a cure for cancer and you want to give it away and nobody wants it.”

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

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New England’s religious apathy has developed over decades, but it’s striking where the Pilgrims landed seeking religious freedom and the great 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards helped spark the First Great Awakening. Stately churches near town centers across 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 substantially have dropped. 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, the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 reported.

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

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

“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 Pastor, whose group trained Bass and supports his Baptist church.

The Rev. Paul Nickerson disagreed.

Local churches declined because of a creeping insularity, not because “we’re theologically inept,” said Nickerson, a church planting specialist for the United Church of Christ’s Massachusetts Conference. Progressive churches that refocus on the needs of the unchurched are growing.

“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,” Nickerson said.