Most people, I think, look at churches as having always been
there. They are part of the landscape, like rocks. They show up on
street corners, on key urban lots. They sit in the midst of
buildings that have been torn down and replaced, seeming permanent,
like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
Indeed, surveys of religious attendance in the United States
tend to promote that view. This U.S. Census survey page from
2001 is typical. It lists respondent’s answers according to
categories like “Catholic,” “Southern Baptist,” “Other Baptist,”
and so forth.
Yet somewhere in the categories that add up from “Other
Protestant,” “Other Specific,” and “Undesignated” (with a
substantial admixture of Baptist and Pentecostal affiliates) lies a
religious trend about which it is very difficult to get
numbers.
I speak of “Bible churches,” those churches explicitly founded
to restore religious teaching from the Bible. I have been able to
find no census of such churches, probably because the congregations
are independently formed and self-supporting, with no national
affiliation. Most illuminatingly, you can put “Bible church” in
quotes in a Google window and find the individual websites of,
literally, thousands of them. Many Yellow Pages providers around
the country — free enterprise forging ahead of government, no
surprise — list “Bible churches” as a religious category right
alongside “Methodist,” “Lutheran,” and all the rest.
PASTOR CHIP THOMPSON IS A LARGE, friendly man with a round, open
face. Most Sundays, he wears the same thing, so much so that it has
become a kind of uniform: gray slacks, a dress shirt and tie, and a
sleeveless dark gray cardigan sweater. No sports jacket or suit
coat. It lends him an approachable and familiar air in the pulpit,
behind which he bobs and weaves and makes large, amiable
gestures.
A gifted public speaker with a mellow voice, Thompson has the
knack of blending colloquial storytelling with the highest concepts
of Biblical scholarship. Most Sundays at his church, New England
Bible Church in Andover, Massachusetts, he preaches for more than
30 minutes, and the time just whizzes by, even for a congregation
well studded with jumpy adolescents and pre-teens. (Children up to
third grade are dismissed from the sanctuary to a well-attended
“children’s church” in an attached classroom and office building
just before the sermon begins.)
Despite his common touch, Chip does not shy from explicating the
thorniest passages of scripture. He is currently preaching on
Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and has said, “I don’t know when we’ll
get done.”
THOMPSON GOT HIS CALL to the ministry when he and his wife lived in
Santa Cruz, California. Thompson was at that time a professional
surfer. His sponsor, the owner of a surf shop, invited Chip and his
wife to his (the sponsor’s) wedding, which turned out to be
officiated by surfer-preacher Jan Jedlicka of Scots Valley Free
Methodist Church.
Jedlicka proved an attractive evangelist to the young
couple.
“We were pot smokers, drinkers,” Thompson recalled. “But he was
a surfer, so he had to be all right.” Jedlicka invited the two to
his house to watch a Billy Graham crusade on television. They
arrived too late for the sermon, “So Jan said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you
what the message was.’ We ended up kneeling on his living room
floor, pledging our lives to Christ.”
Their lives thoroughly changed, Chip and Joan Thompson headed
back to their home state, Florida, to “get some training in the
ministry.” At Pensacola Christian College, in the early 1970s, they
found a great many people like themselves, eager to bring the Good
News directly to…well, it’s safe to say “audiences.” At
graduation, the school urged its newly minted ministers to “go
outside our comfort zone. Don’t stay in the Bible belt.”
The Thompsons picked New England.
THEIR MINISTRY STARTED, as all such do, with knocking on doors. “We
wanted to share the love of God through the simple teaching of the
scriptures,” Thompson said. “We’d let the doctrine unfold from
there.” Their apartment complex gave them use of a meeting room.
“The very first Sunday, we had nearly fifty people. Of course, we
had three families, two of which had six children apiece.”
Thompson had raised some financing for his ministry in
Pensacola. For the rest, it was self-supporting, and he worked
part-time as a carpenter for five years. By word of mouth, the
congregation grew to the point where cars and parking were
beginning to annoy the apartment dwellers. After two years, the new
congregation had to find a new quarters. They began actively
shopping, both for a place to meet and for a place to buy.
For the next two years, the group bounced from a Knights of
Columbus Hall, to an old industrial building in downtown Andover.
“We tried very hard to buy that building,” Thompson said, “but it
turned out to be a Super Fund site, and the liabilities would have
killed us.”
During that time, Thompson happened across the current 12-acre
site, which was vacant, owned by a man named John Callahan.
Callahan wanted half a million dollars for it, and the price was
out of reach. But when Callahan died, his children, wanting to
clear up his investment portfolio, found New England Bible Church’s
name in his records. They got in touch and asked for an offer. The
Thompsons could come up with $150,000. The heirs said yes.
It wasn’t simple consummating the deal. “We spent a long, long
time in land court, arguing with the local powers that be. I’m sure
they were concerned about taking twelve acres off the tax rolls,
for one thing. But then the Greek Orthodox Church was built nearby,
and a housing development.” And the local objections began to look
weaker. Finally, in 1996, a judge looked over her bench at the city
attorney and said, “Anyone knows a church can build in a
residential neighborhood. So why are we here?”
WALK INTO NEW ENGLAND BIBLE CHURCH on a Sunday morning and you’ll
be greeted with the sound of contemporary Christian “praise music,”
played by a guitar-bass-drums-piano band on the dais, with the
words to the songs projected on a screen behind them. Nothing could
have seemed more outlandish to us, as Episcopalians. We first went
at the invitation of friends of our sons, from their taekwondo
lessons.
At the time, I had stopped going to the Episcopal church, and
had retreated instead to daily Bible reading. The Episcopal service
was heartbreakingly bifurcated, between blasts of orthodoxy from
the prayer book and hymns, and the new age pabulum being preached
by the clergy. The appointment of openly gay Gene Robinson to the
bishopric of New Hampshire had been the last straw. I would find
myself crying for the loss of a church. It was unbearable.
Sally, meanwhile, fed up with the pointless lessons our boys
were getting in Episcopal Sunday school, had started taking the
boys to 9 a.m. Sunday school at NEBC, then dropping them off with
me and attending worship services at St. Paul’s for the music and
the liturgy. For her, the break came when the priest at St. Paul’s,
learning of her attendance at NEBC, asked, snarkily, “Do you have
to check your brains at the door?”
NEW ENGLAND BIBLE CHURCH HAS THE LOOK of permanence about it. It is
a low white clapboard building with a conventional steeple, built
in an L-shape, with one leg of the L devoted to the sanctuary, the
other to classrooms and offices, the both covering about 10,000
square feet. The church plans a 10,000-square-foot Family Life
Center next door, which will have a gym and facilities for family
recreation, meetings, and worship. Thompson estimates membership at
350-400.
The building lies a scant mile from Andover Country Club — a
very nice neighborhood indeed. (Andover is home to the prep school
President Bush attended.) A big rock sits smack dab in the middle
of the church parking lot. On it has been painted: “New England
Bible Church, established 1982. Teaching people to know and follow
Jesus.”
The church operates on a faith budget. That means it relies on
weekly collections and pledges, nothing more. NEBC could not get a
construction loan with only land as collateral. So they sold church
bonds, which will mature in 2009. An old-line denominational church
can go along for quite some time with poor attendance and declining
membership. A typical Bible church would die very quickly if people
stopped coming.
Over and over again, Thompson uses a certain phrase: “speak to.”
As in, “We tried to find a way to make the services speak to
contemporary people.” It’s a Newt Gingrich-ism, to my ears. It
works. Indeed, as Newt Gingrich pulled an unexpected revolution in
1994, Bible churches throughout the country, through grit, hard
work, and good communications, are fueling a revolution in
religion. Far from requiring that brains be checked at the door,
Bible churches require a parishioner’s active participation.
People are hungry for religion, not spiritualism. Bible churches
appear to have filled the need. It will be interesting to see how
the movement fares in the years ahead.
