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Megachurches in New England

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(page 6 of 7)

Yet Frank Santora, for one, bristles at the label of "seeker church," even though Faith, as well as Grace, belongs to the WCA and Santora makes no bones about wanting to grow Faith as big as possible. To him, the term connotes a watering-down of Biblical principle. He objects also to suggestions by conservative Christians that the portrayal of a loving God equates with a pick-and-choose, feel-good Christianity geared primarily toward marketing and unduly emphasizing pop psychology. Santora's God, he says, wants His people to thrive, and, moreover, Christians should experience his presence directly in their daily lives.

For evangelical pastors, there's a paradox: To facilitate what congregants consider an open, nonhierarchical link to the divine, the pastor himself must have sufficient presence to keep people coming week after week. And commanding the attention of hundreds or thousands of congregants requires more than old-fashioned charisma. Many pastors make frequent, widespread use of artifacts from the secular world: physical props, popular songs, dramas, and video footage from contemporary movies. For inspiration they may go online--creativepastors.org and pastors.com are two popular sites--and most belong to a variety of resource associations such as Willow Creek.

Yet, even though they share a common theology and similar practices, evangelical churches vary widely in terms of their styles of worship and the populations they draw. That style seems foremost to reflect the pastors themselves: extroverted and hip at Faith, for instance; more understated at Grace; exuberant yet somehow formal at Jubilee. In part, what accounts for the seemingly broad, even disparate, constituencies of New England evangelicals is that along with location, the collective personality of a church vectors it toward a given population: Caucasian and Asian suburbanites in the case of Grace; urban African Americans at Jubilee. A pastor's own sensibilities factor in, as well. Faith's former Catholics might be less drawn to the place if Santora--who himself was raised Catholic--didn't understand their perspective.

Perhaps New England is ripe for a new kind of evangelicalism precisely because it's New England. Douglas Hall, president of Emmanuel Gospel Center, argues that the region always has been a hotbed of religious change--beginning with the Puritanism that prompted the first governor, John Winthrop, to inform settlers of Massachusetts Bay that they had taken out a divine "commission" to make their New World society a godly "city upon a hill," visible to the entire world but also a beacon for lost humanity. When Unitarianism began to take hold in America at the end of the 1700s, traditional Christians responded with a flurry of church plantings of their own.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries, evangelical Christianity experienced several regional resurgences, most famously including the First and Second Great Awakenings, under the preaching of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards in the 1730s-1740s, and Lyman Beecher in the 1820s, respectively. "New England has been the base of national and international revivals for centuries," says Hall. "As parochial as we think New England is, it's often a center for the outreach of Christianity."

It's clear in any case that New England's evangelicals consider themselves a breed apart. Mike Mancini, for one, doesn't even like being called an evangelical. "That term brings to mind so many stereotypes--Southern, hard-hitting, holier-than-thou--none of which expand the kingdom of the God of love," he notes. Elizabeth Clark, too, prefers to dodge the label. "Just call me a Christian," she says. Felicia Brown, who attends Jubilee South in Stoughton, Massachusetts--an outgrowth of the main Jubilee in Boston--also prefers to be known simply as a Christian. "I'm not sure I want to be associated with everything that comes with the term 'evangelical,'" she says.