A Boston Neighborhood Church Is Sustained by Developing Authentic Relationships and Photographs
A finalist image from the annual Through Our Eyes photography competition in Charlestown, MA sponsored by Christ Church Charlestown
Photo by Sophia Moon
When J. D. and Natalie Mangrum moved into the oldest neighborhood in one of America’s oldest cities, they decided that community engagement would be a lifestyle, not an activity. As they started a multicultural, multigenerational Baptist church in 2016, they chose not to schedule a series of public events to garner attention, but to develop authentic friendships that eventually would earn them the opportunities to discuss the Gospel with their neighbors.
A native of the Macon, Georgia, area, Mangrum first visited New England as a fourteen-year-old member of a church youth group that visited Swansea, a town on Boston’s South Shore, to help a church with its backyard Bible clubs. That’s when “New England got in my blood. God just gave me a love for this place,” Mangrum says. He became a Red Sox and Celtics fan and never forgot that formative mission trip. Thirty years later, Mangrum reflects, “I still have a love for all things New England.”
God brought that youthful endeavor to mind when, as the founding pastor of Origins Church in downtown Greenville, SC, he was asked to consider planting another church in the Boston area. After praying about the idea, the Mangrums and their young sons, Noah and Owen, moved to Charlestown, Boston’s oldest neighborhood and the site of the famous Battle of Bunker Hill which, on June 17, 1775, gave the colonists the courage they needed to win the Revolutionary War. Today, Mangrum is pastor of Christ Church Charlestown.
During their first year living in Charlestown, Mangrum, 45, served with Charles River Church in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood to learn about the community and receive training about life in Boston. They spent much of 2017 asking many questions about what qualities Bostonians value, which, it turns out, include “patience, kindness, and loyalty.” “Nothing moves quickly,” they were told, “so don’t be discouraged.” Not wanting to appear to be a “colonizer” from the South, Mangrum said, “You have to earn trust.”
Every day that year, they learned the names of people they met in a grocery store, a school, or a park. After about six months, they got to know about 1,000 people. At the same time, Natalie was asked to lead the parent council at the elementary school their children attended, while J. D. coached Little League baseball and eventually was invited to join the neighborhood council.
Eventually, they started their own worship gatherings, meeting in an elementary school at first, online-only for six months during the Covid-19 pandemic, in a park for two months, in a small theater for seven months, and at the Abraham Lincoln veterans post, a short walk from the famed Bunker Hill Monument. Their vagabond existence came to an end in March 2022 when they were given an amazing gift: the oldest church in the neighborhood.
First Church in Charlestown held its inaugural worship service in July 1629, three years before its official founding in 1632. The Congregationalists were served by thirty-three pastors including for a year (1637–38) by John Harvard, an English dissenting minister in Colonial America whose deathbed bequest funded what became Harvard University. After a decline from 271 members in 1837 to fifteen members in 2015, the church affiliated with Baptist Churches of New England six years ago. But they came to a crossroads when Pastor Erik Maloy (2015–22) decided to move out of state.
Rather than turn the building over to a history museum, a bicycle shop, or a bookstore, as has happened to many old New England church facilities, Maloy met with Mangrum and decided to donate the building on Green Street to the church planters. “We’re a newish church that is stewarding a beautiful old legacy. We want to see what those Puritans started 400 years ago be in its brightest place today. That’s our heart,” the church planter said.
What’s old is new again! During the last year, Christ Church Charlestown has benefited from a centrally located facility near Thompson Square, a permanent home that, although expensive to heat in the winter, did not require a mortgage. The result has been steady membership growth. “Our church has really grown in the last year,” Mangrum reported. Approximately seventy people attend worship on a typical Sunday, a third of whom are counted as members. They welcome five or six first-time visitors a week and have set a goal of counting five to ten percent of the attendance as guests.
How do they accomplish such a worthy outreach goal? As any real estate agent will note, it’s about location. The church’s highly visible building is an important draw when people facing death, illness, or any number of crises seek comfort, prayer, or spiritual guidance. There are only three other churches in the immediate area—two Roman Catholic parishes and an Episcopal congregation. Christ Church Charlestown is known to some simply as “the Protestant church.”
Volunteers from Christ Church Charlestown painting faces at Spring Egg Hunt with Charlestown Mothers Association
Beyond geography and architecture, though, the simple answer is community engagement, but not by the typical methods used by many church planters. They do not create many special events like Christmas giveaways or backpack drives. “We refuse to do a lot of that because we want to build relationships rather than be known as a church that just gives stuff away. . . . When you build relationships that earn trust—and help other people succeed in what they’re passionate about and what they feel called to do—I think God blesses that. And you earn the favor of your community in that way,” Mangrum explained.
Every community engagement event except for one is planned strictly for the benefit of municipal and not-for-profit groups. “We asked our neighbors: What do you do? How can we celebrate that? How can we help you make your event be the best it can be?” Mangrum commented. For example, on the day before Easter, they assisted the Charlestown Mothers Association to give away 8,000 plastic Easter eggs stuffed with non-candy gifts that some 350 children enjoyed. Each Halloween, the church members assist the Bunker Hill Monument Association by sponsoring a photo booth, and each year they honor all 400 schoolteachers in the neighborhood by giving them a gift card or a free lunch from a rented food truck.
“We’ve only created one outreach event in our history”—an annual photography project. Every fall since 2019 they give out a hundred disposable cameras and ask their neighbors “to photograph life in this community from their perspective.” The Through Our Eyes Project “puts cameras in the hands” of their neighbors, provides everyone with a fresh perspective on life in their economically diverse neighborhood, and connects people of all ages who otherwise might never meet.
Kayla Stephens, a pediatric nurse who coordinates the church’s children’s ministry and community engagement, asks residents to take pictures of the things around them as they go about their daily lives. Photographers are given a week to take the pictures. Every photo is printed and judged for content and creativity, and the top twenty images are enlarged and shown at a public exhibition at the church. Before moving into their historic building, they rented an art gallery for a couple of weekends. A selection of their best photos from 2021 may be viewed online.
Opening Reception at Through Our Eyes Project, Charlestown 2023
Later this year, Mangrum and a missions team will host a photo gallery and train others to replicate the photo project in Manchester, UK, in cooperation with the International Mission Board (IMB). Christ Church Charlestown affiliates with Baptist Churches of New England, which is developing a multi-country, IMB-sponsored partnership with churches in Europe.
Through Our Eyes started when Church at the Mill, Spartanburg, SC, wanted to profile their neighbors and document the realities of homelessness. The first photographers were people who experienced homelessness. The project has since been developed in other cities. The Charlestown project is not about homelessness, but about connecting neighbors for mutual edification.
All their community engagement work can be summarized in a single sentence: “Our church’s mission is to bring Charlestown together around the Gospel.” For the Mangrum family, living and growing a church in Boston has been “a dream come true” for them.
A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor.