Church finds hospitable place of worship
Since February, upwards of 175 people have gathered weekly in the Westminster Room on the second floor of the Hilton Boston Back Bay. Their meetings feature the accoutrements you would expect at a big hotel event, including a band and video screenings. When the meeting breaks up, a hotel official may wander in and ask if the arrangements were to their liking.
Welcome to church.
Reunion Christian Church is one of at least two congregations in Boston that depends on the hospitality industry for its house of worship. (An older Presbyterian congregation, Citylife Church of Boston, meets at the Radisson Hotel Boston near Boston Common.)
Reunion's inaugural service included music you won't find in a hymnal, the Foo Fighters's "My Hero," being the best example. At other services, said the Rev. Hank Wilson, the pastor, "you can come and hear anything from a Dashboard Confessional song [that group wrote a track for the "Spider-Man 2" soundtrack] to a Beatles song."
This church hearkens back to Christianity's infant days, not that the communities St. Paul founded met in a hotel or grooved to pop music or advertised on a subway, as Reunion did. But, evocative of those first Christians, both Reunion and Citylife find a key part of their mission in "community groups."
Reunion, which is nondenominational, offers small gatherings during the week in individual members' homes. "One of our main goals is getting to know each other and building relationships," said Anisha Tischer, who hosts a women's group in her Boston home. Participants at her meetings, which last 90 minutes, typically spend half that time discussing a topic from Scripture and the rest chatting over a snack.
That is not unlike the earliest Christian gatherings described by scholars; long before institutional religion crafted rituals and rules, those first followers of Jesus also gathered in homes and probably focused their worship around a communal meal, with singing, and prayer.
Though not strictly part of the house-church movement, because of its Sunday en masse worship, Reunion models its community groups on the home-based church gatherings in Acts.
A father of four who at 32 doesn't look like a traditional cleric (he sports an eyebrow ring), Wilson moved to Boston from his native Illinois, where he ran high school and college ministries. Some years ago, he attended a conference where the idea of "church planting" fascinated him. As he surveyed the country for fertile ground for his own church, Boston blipped on his radar because of a large number of nonbelievers and the heavy Catholic heritage of those who do believe.
"I wasn't looking necessarily for something difficult, but . . . it felt like there was a need here," Wilson said.
Indeed, the name Reunion refers to the moment in the parable of the prodigal son at which the father welcomes his returning son, who had abandoned the family. Those who similarly have skipped out on church are the types Reunion hopes to embrace. And while the church does have its beliefs -- Jesus as the Messiah, the Bible as literal history -- freedom to think otherwise is a given, said Wilson.
This soft-glove approach to evangelical Christianity was bred in part by personal experiences that made him wary of set-in-stone theology. His father was a pastor who tangled with a resistant congregation when he tried to set up services for the hungry and homeless. "I almost walked away from spirituality and Christianity altogether because of how I saw my dad treated," Wilson said.
For all its embrace of pop culture, his church sees areas, from poverty to the recent spike in violence in the city, in which the broader culture needs changing. Tischer expects her community group to evolve to the point where participating in community service becomes part of its agenda.
"One of the core values of our church is generosity," she said. She and her husband, who relocated from St. Louis to Boston to help start the church -- he's on its staff -- were blasé about worshiping in a hotel.
But "other people seem mind-boggled," she said. "If I say church, most people get a distinct mental picture. You don't think the second floor of the Hotel Hilton in downtown Boston."
Yet having to prepare a secular room for worship (organizers arrive at 7 a.m. Sundays to get ready for the 10:30 a.m. service) instills an appreciation of the commitment behind church, Tischer says.
Her pastor looks to the day when his flock can afford to meet in a real church. Yet a hotel helps keep them focused on what's important.
"Church is not an event" or a building, Wilson said. "It is people."
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