Recent News
Thousands of university students were on the move to Boston over the Labor Day weekend and they needed a lot of help. Nearly three hundred Baptists from seven states came to their rescue at the invitation of King’s Hill Church.
A single approach is not enough for Stamford Baptist Church. The multiethnic and multicultural congregation supports ministry in New England in two distinct ways.
“But the word of God increased and multiplied” (Acts 12:24, ESV) in the first-century Middle East and it is doing so in twenty-first century New England.
That’s the inspiring message that New England Baptists can expect to be preached in various ways from the podium and discussed in small-group workshops when they attend the Baptist Churches of New England annual meeting—the theme of which will be “Multiplication Matters.”
Sarah Crowther spent part of her summer vacation from college exploring Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal, which has been described as “a vibrant European city [where] tradition fuels creativity.” She visited the UNESCO World Heritage destination, not as a tourist, but as short-term missionary. From August 2-12 she sought and found a measure of “spiritual renewal.”
Exactly a year after rain-soaked rivers escaped their banks, filling many basements with mud and many hearts with despair, torrential rain returned July 10 to Barre and other Vermont communities, destroying or causing major damage to more than one hundred homes, according to a preliminary report.
An abiding passion to live as disciples of Jesus has attracted a church full of college students, graduate students, and people with advanced degrees to Antioch Baptist Church, which is located in the world-class academic community of Greater Boston.
Seven church leaders from Brazil traveled to New England in July to explore the benefits and challenges of multicultural ministry in a post-Christian world and return home with fresh ideas on how to effectively serve their neighbors from Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and other Latin American countries.
A monumental slice of New England Baptist history happened on June 2 when the first Vietnamese church in the Baptist Churches of New England network ordained their first pastor.
It can take decades to grow a thriving church in the spiritually rocky soil of New England, and it can take a lifetime to learn the essential lessons of faithful discipleship. Consider the forty-year ministry of Neal Davidson.
“When it comes to kids’ ministry I want to soak in every bit of training I can and hear the curriculum taught from different perspectives,” wrote Renee Hauser, an experienced Vacation Bible School leader from North Carolina.
Associate Executive Director Hal Haller, who strengthened the Baptist Churches of New England’s church-planting efforts, developed a church “multiplier team,” and led in the creation of an interdenominational partnership to start new congregations, completed his ministry in New England after nearly four years of leadership at the BCNE. He plans to move to Florida later this month to coach business executives.
Aaron Cockrum takes seriously God’s challenge to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you . . . and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Apparently, town officials and civic leaders in Hooksett, NH, concur.
The late Pentecostal scholar Gordon D. Fee, who taught for almost two decades at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA, once told an academic gathering at which he was being honored that he “was spurred on to scholarship in part when he heard a minister say from the pulpit, ‘I would rather be a fool on fire than a scholar on ice’”—which led Fee “to the conviction that it should be possible to be a ‘scholar on fire.’’’
The urban ministry that W. Ruben Exantus and the thirty Haitian pastors he serves has been anything but predictable in the last few years. The challenges they confront every day have been complicated by the influx of migrants arriving in Boston by the thousands.
The “only region where Southern Baptist churches are growing numerically is in New England,” reported Lifeway Research in September 2023. The Baptist Churches of New England Annual Church Profile data for 2001-23 confirm that bold statement.

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“What a joy it is to walk with pastors as they seek to multiply Christ-followers in communities across New England.”
— Dr. Terry Dorsett, BCNE executive director