Barstool churches

Old-time religion in new locations infiltrate Boston

By ALEXANDRA DEDNAH

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"Jesus brought kegs to a party!" David W. Hill, the self-proclaimed "Preacher Dude" of the Fenway Church, shouts to an audience of approximately 50 attendees. Hill, 26, stands in front of the stage in jeans and a polo shirt, paraphrasing a story from the Book of John in which Jesus turns water to wine for a wedding party. "God liked to party," he says. So do Fenway Church's parishioners. That's why they meet at 1pm on Sundays.

The congregation of Fenway Church, which is composed largely of young adults in their 20s and 30s, started worshipping at a new venue on October 5th. It doesn't have pews or an organ, but it does offer a stage, surround sound, plasma TVs and a bar. The space, chosen with ironic purpose, is Church, the bar/restaurant/club nestled in the Fenway neighborhood on Kilmarnock Street. The two pool tables are moved aside to fit about 30 fold-out metal chairs. Others seat themselves on stools along the bar in back, where several small gargoyle statues peer out between liquor bottles.

Hill says he really got to know the Fenway area while studying finance at Boston University, and found that most residents lack what he calls "a healthy understanding" of the Bible and Jesus; he estimates that "well under 1,000" of the roughly 36,000 Fenway residents attend church regularly. "There are other churches in the area, but a lot of them are not culturally accessible to the people who make up the Fenway demographics," Hill explains. "They're young professionals, they're driven, they're partiers. They're not the type of people who are going to walk into a traditional church service at 10 on a Sunday morning."

Onstage, the Worship Team plays mellow Christian rock on a Casio keyboard and an acoustic guitar. The audience, some with arms outstretched and palms to the sky, tap their toes and shake their hips, singing along with the aid of lyrics projected on a screen. The one involuntary member of the service mans the soundboard while flipping through a graphic novel. The only ones dressed to impress are the Hills' two young daughters. Otherwise, jeans and sweatshirts meet the dress code.

Pablo Cardona, a 24-year-old Berklee College of Music student, found out about the church from one of the flyers that were sent to residents within the Fenway zip code in September. "It's fitting," he says. "They're adjusting to the needs of the people."

Jeremy Jackson says he began attending Fenway Church in September when it still met in houses instead of a bar. "I like that it's immersed in youth culture," says Jackson, a 24 year old who grew up attending orthodox churches full of organ, choir and liturgy. He didn't find a church that met his needs until he moved to Montreal for college and attended a community church in a YWCA. "Within a year, I'd made some of the closest friendships of my life and confronted some o f the problems and fears I never thought I'd confront. It challenged me to live a life of authentic faith," he says, adding that Hill shares his vision of what a church should be.

To some of Fenway Church's members, like 28-year-old Chris Bressoud, who plays guitar for the Worship Team, church has never been conventional. "This is traditional church for me," he says.

Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology of religion at Boston University, says the challenge of reaching out to young adults today is probably unprecedented, especially since many have never participated in church. "Young adults are a demographic that likes to have a place to go to socialize," she says. "They're less likely to have held a job for a long period of time or be part of an organization, and marry much later in life."

In the past decade, traditional churches have seen a decline in attendance, according to Gallup polling data. Prior to the 1970s, attendance remained within the 70th percentile, and as recently as 1999, attendance was documented at 70 percent of the general population. Since 2002, however, it's slipped to 63 percent, with only 44 percent of Americans considered "frequent" church-goers. But smaller, informal churches like Fenway have been sprouting up, and attendance is growing. Last February, The Barna Group, a Christian polling organization that studies trends in American Christians (who comprise four out of five US adults), released the results of a nationwide telephone survey of 1,005 people; the survey showed that the majority of Christians now believe that there are "various biblically legitimate alternatives" to conventional church experiences. The report states: "Those alternatives include engaging in faith activities at home, with one's family (considered acceptable by 89 percent of adults); being active in a house church (75 percent); watching a religious television program (69 percent); listening to a religious radio broadcast (68 percent); attending a special ministry event, such as a concert or community service activity (68 percent); and participating in a marketplace ministry (54 percent)."

While Hill says it's not directly overseen by any hierarchy, Fenway Church is part of a larger "family" of churches called Newfrontiers. Newfrontiers is a 40-year-old institution that began in the UK, with a mission of "planting" churches. It now boasts more than 600 churches worldwide, with settings that range from a former bus garage, to a former bingo hall / old cinema. One meets on a football field. The emphasis is more on community than location, according to the Newfrontiers website, which states: "The New Testament describes a number of ways new churches began. These include the preaching of the gospel to large crowds; giving an account before a few people; gathering a crowd through miracles taking place; and teaching in a home. Newfrontiers is involved in all of these." But churches centered more on congregations than buildings may double as a survival strategy, given the cost of infrastructure maintenance (wooden steeples are prone to weather damage and can cost upwards of $1 million to repair). More than 40 Catholic churches in Greater Boston closed in 2004 after funding dropped in the wake of the clergy sex abuse scandal.

Newfrontiers has provided some financial support for the Fenway Church endeavor, but most funding comes from Hill's family, friends and the church "team," a core group of members that meet regularly and dedicate around 10 percent of their income to the church. Fenway is also a planting of a larger church run by Hill's father, called Abundant Grace, based out of an office building in Brighton. The younger Hill started Fenway Church about three years ago as a group of college-aged members of Abundant Grace started meeting in houses.

Fenway Church isn't unusual in its choice of a bar as a setting for Christian services. Two years ago, the North Brooklyn Vineyard Church began holding Sunday services at Trash Bar, a bar/rock venue with "truck-stop kitsch." Unlike the Fenway congregation, they drink at services. "That's why you go to a bar ... We're not some do-gooders trying to be hip. We're very comfortable there," says Vineyard Church Pastor Mike Turrigiano, adding that he knew the idea wasn't "scandalous" when he heard from friends in the UK and Germany, who'd already started worshipping in bars.

Even conventional churches see the attraction of talking religion with the spirits. Theology on Tap is a term trademarked by the Roman Catholic Church for a bar-setting lecture series spearheaded by Father John Cusick of the Chicago Archdiocese in 1982. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Massachusetts initiated a similar series in Boston in 1999, later embraced by the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Boston.

The Reverend Patrick Gray is director of Friends at the Advent ("Fat A"), a social group for Church of the Advent members in their 20s and 30s. "At Church of the Advent, we're pretty high church ... lots of bells, lots of ritual," Gray says as he sips a Sam Adams Octoberfest in Cheers bar on Beacon Street. "It doesn't feel real friendly." So he strives to cultivate community in other ways, like Theology on Tap, dance parties and Rock Band nights.

At Theology on Tap, Christian young adults from the Advent and other churches/denominations such as Vineyard in Back Bay, Park Street Church in downtown Boston and Trinity Church in Copley Square, drink and mingle before a lecture on topics ranging from "the Holy Spirit" to "the Gospel according to Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"I think the general attitude is that they want to be in a thicker community with people their own age," says Gray, who also divulges it's "soft sell" Christianity for parishioners' friends. "A typical Episcopal parishioner is not going to go, 'Hey, you want to go to church with me on Sunday?' because that's a little weird. But you can ask them to go to a bar and there's at least a curiosity factor."

Gray says he "absolutely" accepts alternative church spaces (like Fenway's) as legitimate places for worship. Though the Church of the Advent and Fenway Church might differ in their practices, theologically, they are similarly conservative. Both Hill and Gray say that their churches welcome anyone, but, says Hill, "Jesus is exclusive in that he claimed the only way to God was through him," and thus, they preach a literal reading of the Bible with respect to marriage, homosexuality and abortion.

"I don't have anything against denominational churches. For the orthodox ones, we hold many of the same beliefs, the same message," says Hill. "It's just they've lost the ability to communicate that message with our current culture."

James Ehrman, executive director of the World Christianity initiative at Yale University attributes the outdated methods of conventional churches to a postmodern cultural shift, which he explains is not necessarily generational. "In postmodernity, people gather truth claims in smaller, more intimate groups," he says, adding that people now favor orthopraxy over orthodoxy.

Ehrman likens the leaders of "organic faith communities" (non-institutional churches) to modern-day missionaries, with bars and coffee shops as "the new altar." According to Ehrman, the movement toward more organic faith communities has been growing for the past 20 years, and harkens back to first-century "Christianity that meets people in the marketplace where they are. Bostonians carry a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion," he says, as opposed to other areas of the country.

The case of Fenway Church is no exception. Church's co-owner, Kristian Deyesso, says he's received complaints from patrons worried that their money is going to support organized religion. This is the first time that Church has hosted a church group and Deyesso, who describes himself as a "devout agnostic," makes it clear that his use of the name "Church" is merely a clever theme. "David's a great guy," says Deyesso. "The concern is that they meet here every Sunday. I just need to have it known that we are in no way, shape or form associated with them."

Whether the Fenway Church "experiment" will succeed is still floating. "It's such an unknown," says Betsy Hill, 27, David's wife. The majority in the crowd are original Fenway Church members, but there's a steady rotation of new faces. While Boston's rotating college population may play a part in the phenomenon, Turrigiano likes to refer to them as "spiritual travelers."

"I don't think spirituality in America is waning," he says, "but I do think tradition is."