Church planting cultivates Christians
Imagine being forced from your village at age 14 as men with enormous appetites for inflicting misery burn it to the ground. Your grandfather and an uncle are killed. You spend nine years in a refugee camp. There, after so much trauma, you meet missionaries who, while helping to feed and shelter you, talk about the all-embracing love of Jesus.
Running for his life from the Khmer Rouge in his native Cambodia, young Rinn Sim ran into the arms of the God described by those evangelists in the Thailand camp. He became a Christian.
"My country had so much war, killing each other," said Sim, now 49. "I [saw] Christians have a lot of passion, a lot of love."
Years later, having made his way to the United States, he took up the job of spreading the faith himself, founding the New Life Cambodian Christian Church in Lowell seven years ago. The church attracts up to 40 worshipers each week to services in space it rents in a local Baptist church.
"I think God was calling me to become a minister, to reach out to the Cambodian community here," said Sim, whose fellow Cambodians in Lowell have burgeoned into a sizable and active presence.
Sim's church was an early fruit of the church-planting efforts of Restoration House Ministries. Starting seven years ago, the Manchester, N.H.-based group began an effort to do for Christianity what Johnny Appleseed did for horticulture. Armed with a budget of $1 million provided by a network of churches around the country, Restoration House has seeded the New England landscape with 14 new churches, including three in Massachusetts.
Church planting, a nationwide effort by mostly evangelical churches, "is an old term that has gained new meaning and application," said Danny D. Clymer, executive director of Restoration House. "The idea originates in Scripture," specifically Matthew's Gospel, in which the risen Jesus instructs his apostles to "go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations."
The new meaning, at least as interpreted by Restoration House, is that rather than a building accommodating existing members of a faith, its church planters bring the Christian message to those unaffiliated with religion.
In 2000, 36 percent of Massachusetts residents reported no religious affiliation, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives, housed at Pennsylvania State University. The Bay State looked positively pious next to neighboring New Hampshire, where more than half the population was unaffiliated.
Clymer, an Indiana native, believes that those statistics low-ball the real numbers of the unaffiliated, because many people who say they are Catholic or Protestant, perhaps having been raised in those traditions, never set foot in a church on weekends.
Working with Sim was no accident; Restoration House has a special arm devoted to fostering churches among immigrant communities as well.
As Clymer describes it, the process for fertilizing its plants is rigorous. "We typically will put $300,000 into a church plant in the first two or three years," recruiting a potential pastor and providing salaries for that person and an aide.
Restoration House has an experienced coach on retainer to help pastors establish and advertise their church. A half dozen church leaders meet every three months with the pastor, not only as consultants but to guarantee accountability. Restoration House screens pastor candidates to make sure they have the administrative skills to manage a congregation.
Mainline denominations, meanwhile, are not sitting on their hands. Spurred by the success of conservative Christians' evangelizing efforts and a withering in recent decades of mainline church attendance, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts is in the midst of an effort to raise Sunday attendance at its churches 50 percent by 2013. The United Church of Christ has launched a national "Stillspeaking Initiative" for people alienated by religion.
"This is something that all churches take seriously," said the Rev. Diane Kessler, executive director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, an organization of Orthodox and Protestant denominations.
Kessler said evangelism is a positive development if it brings to church people with no religious affiliation, but she cautions that churches must be sensitive to their peers to avoid a situation similar to that in Latin America . There, she says, competition between Roman Catholics and Pentecostals for adherents has fired hostility between the two denominations.
"What we would advise . . . to be ecumenically accountable when you do evangelism," said Kessler. "We're all evangelizing for the body of Christ, and you do not do it by denigrating another Christian tradition."
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