At Grace Chapel, painting while praying

I’ve been covering religion in Boston for nine years, but until this morning I had never made it out to Lexington to check out Grace Chapel, one of the few megachurches in New England. The church is not large by national standards, but, with about 3,000 worshipers each weekend, it’s among the largest and most vibrant Protestant congregations in this region.

Grace Chapel, a nondenominational evangelical congregation that was founded by four families in a private home in the 1950s, today has all the elements that characterize contemporary evangelical megachurches, starting with the traffic jam out front and the overflow parking in several satellite lots served by shuttle buses. (Among the service opportunities listed in the bulletin is this gem: “Looking for a place to serve, and love the outdoors? Consider serving through the parking ministry.”) Inside, the church building is a beehive of activity – there is a coffee shop (with Fair Trade coffee, of course), a huge “kidstown” that serves 800 youngsters each weekend, a hall where people with crying kids can watch the service on video, classrooms, a gymnasium, halls for middle school, high school, and young adult ministries, and a sanctuary that seats 1,200. There are several other buildings that house offices and adult education programs. There are greeters and ushers and counselors everywhere; during the service, everyone is encouraged to meet someone new.

The 65-minute worship service is about half music, led today by a 30-member choir and a 20-piece orchestra, complete with a conductor and a music director. There is lots of video, and today the whole room was decorated with poinsettias and wreaths and trees with twinkling lights.

Much of that is now de rigueur in evangelical congregations, but I did see one thing today that I have never seen before, despite years of visiting congregations: liturgical painting. Through much of the service, an artist named Lori Dupre was up on the stage, standing on a white drop cloth in front of a black canvas, painting an image of a human hand outstretched toward a dove (above). The image was designed to coordinate with pastor Bryan Wilkerson’s sermon. I talked with Dupre after the service; she calls her work “live worship painting” and said she had first seen it done at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California. Dupre said it took her some time to muster the courage to paint in front of the congregation; now she does it a few times a year. (Dupre’s husband, Peter, is the pastor of worship and the arts at Grace, and he said the congregation also uses a fair amount of drama and poetry and music during services – today there was also a dramatic reading of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which served as the starting point for Wilkerson’s sermon.)

I chatted with Wilkerson for a bit after the service; he said the four weekend services range from the traditional to the contemporary, and that the building was expanded three years ago with an eye toward creating a place where people might stay, hang out, and talk with one another. The congregation has about 100 small groups that meet in homes, has a mothers' group for new moms, and a new recovery program for people struggling with all kinds of addictions (the church calls them “hurts, habits and hang-ups”). Wilkerson said the congregation has about 2,400 registered members, but noted that at evangelical churches membership tends to be lower than attendance (unlike, say, Catholic churches, where the lists of members are significantly higher than the actual weekend attendance). He said that at least one-third of the congregation is made up of people who were born Catholic; another 40 percent or so have a Protestant background, and the balance are a mix of former Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and the unchurched. The congregation has an annual budget of about $7 million, $1.5 million of which is given away, and about 50 employees.

Wilkerson said one challenge facing the congregation is that it is running out of space. He said Grace has planted a second congregation, GracePoint Community Church in Andover, but that the new trend among large evangelical churches is establishing satellite campuses, and that Grace is now contemplating whether to move in that direction.

He said the congregation’s other challenge is more local, and that is overcoming what he says are inaccurate images of evangelicals, particularly here in New England. “The hard thing is the stereotypes people have of us – that we’re narrow-minded, no-fun Republicans,’’ he said. “We work hard at being creative, intelligent, welcoming and multi-ethnic.’’ Wilkerson estimated that the congregation is about 20 percent non-white (simultaneous translation of the service is available in Korean and Portuguese), and said there is a large representation of both political parties in the congregation – he said he tends to shy away from political preaching and political activism because “I don’t want anybody to confuse the message of Christ with a political issue’’ (he said he doesn't even know whether the congregation is a member of the National Association of Evangelicals). He said Grace is trying to be more active in the community, and noted that it has a thriving English for Speakers of Other Languages program.

Wilkerson, like other pastors, is also bracing for a tough 2009 because of the economy; he said he is already seeing job losses in his congregation, and that the church is planning to start a job networking group after the holidays.

I asked him about the theological rigor of the congregation, since one of the raps about this kind of church is that it can sometimes seem like a community center, with high production values and preaching that is affirming and comforting but not challenging. He said that the preaching at Grace is very Christian in content, and said the congregation seeks a “high commitment’’ from its members, including not only attendance at worship, but also enrollment in a course, membership in a small group, and service to the community.

Wilkerson volunteered that he is sometimes asked how contemporary evangelical churches differ from Unitarian Universalist congregations. This was not, to me, an obvious question, or even a comparison I had ever thought about, given how theologically and politically different UUs and evangelicals tend to be. But as I thought about it, I saw the similarities – a low bar to entry (you can believe anything or nothing and be welcomed through the door), a strong emphasis on community, and an absence of much liturgical ritual or iconography. Wilkerson said the difference is that, although both UUism and evangelicalism welcome anyone, the evangelical congregations seek to transform participants into Christian believers. In other words, he said, in either an evangelical or a UU congregation, “you can come as you are,’’ but in an evangelical congregation “you don’t stay that way.’’