Haitian Leader Does “Whatever I Can to Bring the Gospel” to Migrants in Boston

A group of Hatian migrants gather for fellowship

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.

Migrant families are coming to Boston to find the security and stability they need to survive. These are the realities that most of the newcomers have not found back home on their troubled Caribbean island. Christians who affiliate with the Baptist Churches of New England pray that they also will discover eternal peace in Jesus Christ.  

“It is horrible for the migrants” who for personal reasons flee Haiti and other countries and find their way to New England, where they are welcomed by pastors and churches, said Exantus, who mobilizes Haitian churches across six states with a focus on Boston.  

“It’s a terrible situation for all the churches in New England,” which he says are short of funds needed to adequately care for the migrants. Nevertheless, they rent hotel rooms, create safe spaces to live in basements, provide food, offer counsel and prayers, and conduct additional worship services for the new arrivals.    

Undocumented Haitians, Venezuelans, and others who live in other parts of the United States also are drawn to Eastern Massachusetts. Due to the “overflow of migrants, the Haitian churches in Boston have a lot of problems that we didn’t expect,” comments Exantus, founder and pastor of New Vision Community Church International, now located in Waltham, MA.

Exantus cannot accurately count the ever-increasing number of Haitian and other migrants, but he says since January the churches have spent more than $20,000 on food and lodging for this part of their ministries. He seeks additional donations to underwrite the expenses of their outreach and requests prayer for the churches and those they serve each day.

“The flood of people arriving in the United States from Haiti shows no signs of abating as [their] home country grows dangerously close to collapse,” according to a recent Boston Globe report. Massachusetts has “a long-established Haitian community, with the third-largest Haitian population in the country; according to state data, which is likely incomplete, 72 percent of recent new arrivals to the state have come from Haiti.”

“As the immigrating families flee one crisis, they find themselves part of another, as Massachusetts experiences an unprecedented wave of people seeking refuge from political upheaval, economic turmoil, and violence in Haiti and elsewhere,” the Globe also reported. Massachusetts “has a unique right-to-shelter law that guarantees temporary housing and services to families with children and those who are pregnant, including new arrivals in the country who are lawfully seeking asylum,” the Globe reported on April 19. 

W. Ruben Exantus and his wife Florence

Exantus keeps active with other priorities that include training and equipping church leaders for effective ministry and creating “relationships between the pastors, many of whom do not know each other.” Most of the churches he coordinates are in the Boston area, but he also connects with Haitian congregations and leaders in Connecticut and Rhode Island. He is planning a regional conference of Haitian pastors to be held this summer.

The 62-year-old church leader decided on ministry as a career after graduating from Northeastern University and working in Massachusetts and Florida as a medical devices engineer specializing in the design of diabetes testing instruments. “I felt called to go deeper into ministry,” Exantus comments. While working in Florida, he also was senior pastor-teacher for a dozen years (2002-13) at Grace Baptist Church, Apopka.

Then Exantus returned to New England and became the mission pastor of Nashua Baptist Church for three years (2013-16). The Southern New Hampshire congregation was then led by Pastor Sam Taylor; Taylor later was the BCNE’s Boston Area Regional Coordinator and is now the  Global Missions Mobilizer.

Two years later, the Nashua church commissioned Exantus to plant New Vision Community Church International in Nashua, but the group decided to move to the Boston area when an insufficient number of Haitians was found in New Hampshire. New Vision describes itself as “A Kingdom-minded Predominantly Haitian Church [that] exists to connect people to Jesus and add value to each other.”

The senior pastor-teacher describes the Waltham church he leads as “a victim of COVID-19.” The group still meets only online following the pandemic which Exantus sees as both “an advantage because we have the opportunity to minister to people from several countries” and a disadvantage because the worshippers miss the benefits of in-person fellowship.

Exantus preaches in Creole with a mix of French and English and music is presented primarily a cappella. An average of forty people join the weekly Zoom worship meetings. He is trying to reach more Haitians by holding Bible study meetings in Framingham, MA, but the inability to find an affordable meeting space has proven to be “very challenging for us.”

When asked what he enjoys most about pastoral ministry, Exantus describes himself as a church planter and says, “I enjoy serving people! I am trying to do whatever I can to bring the gospel to people. That’s what I am called to do and that’s what I’m doing now.”

A 2004 graduate of Luther Rice College and Seminary in Lithonia, GA, Exantus traveled all over the Caribbean when he was the Executive Director of Mission (1988-99) of AMJCH, Inc., Mattapan, MA, a ministry that “served and helped the needy people of the third-world countries through mission trips.”

Exantus earned a PhD in 2011 with a focus on organizational management from Capella University, a  Minneapolis-based online school. Since then, he has been a leadership consultant for the Rex Institute for Research and Leadership Development.

The Haitian leader is the author of Pastoral Burnout and Leadership Styles: Factors Contributing to Stress and Ministerial Turnover (2012) and Spiritual Connection Within: How to Connect with God Through Effectual Prayers (2023).

He devotes several days a week as a chaplain at Care Dimensions, Danvers, MA, the largest hospice and palliative care organization in Massachusetts, where his wife, Florence, a registered nurse, is the senior clinical director of long-term care and assisted living. Exantus says he especially enjoys listening to and praying with dying patients and their families. “There is nothing more rewarding” than being present when a patient on the brink of death makes “a quiet decision of faith before she dies. That brings me much joy. It’s fantastic!”

A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor.