History Is Helping BCNE Become “New England Baptists” Rather Than Southern Baptists Serving in New England
First Baptist Church of Marlborough, Massachusetts, held their first annual marriage retreat in May (above). The historic church started when a home prayer group organized themselves as a church with nineteen charter members on April 14, 1868.
What Does It Really Mean to Say That We Are “New England Baptists”?
In recent decades, Baptist Churches of New England (BCNE) “has been transformed largely because old, historic churches have joined us and are helping us rethink what it really means to reach New Englanders with the gospel,” said BCNE Executive Director Terry Dorsett.
At least twenty churches have existed and even thrived in New England’s spiritually rocky soil since the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries—and have only recently joined the BCNE church network. “They have helped us become ‘New England Baptists’ instead of just Southern Baptists ministering in New England,” he added.
Being a truly New England Baptist church means that a congregation chooses to identify more with its regional identity and historical connections than with the heritage of the denomination with which it voluntarily affiliates.
Southern Baptist pastors ministering in New England—whether native-born or an immigrant to the six-state region—must intentionally plant and cultivate roots deep in the cultures of New England and, despite the inevitable challenges of ministry in what some call a ‘post-Christian’ environment, learn to navigate the region’s complexity.
Twelve churches established before 1800 are now part of the BCNE network. They are:
1632 Christ Church, Charlestown, MA
1716 Hebron Church of Hope, Hebron, CT
1727 Federated Church of Willington, CT
1735 Legacy Church (First Baptist Church), Sutton, MA
1738 Greenville Baptist Church, Rochdale. MA
1765 First Baptist Church. Haverhill, MA
1773 Stamford Baptist Church, Stamford, CT
1780 Market Street Baptist Church, Amesbury, MA
1780 First Baptist Church - Wallingford, VT
1789 Cheshire Baptist Church, Cheshire, MA
1794 First Baptist Church, Williamstown, MA
1796 Whiting Community Church, Whiting, VT
Being a truly New England Baptist church means employing a faithful pastor who understands or is willing to learn the New England cultural mosaic.
A pastor in this context must depend completely on God’s grace, following what Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians (Eph 3:16-17, NIV): “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, [will be] rooted and established in love. . .”
Additionally, a faithful pastor must contextualize since ministry in Maine is different than in Connecticut, which is different than in Boston.
Indigenous Pastors Committed to Longevity
When a BCNE church engages a pastor who is a native New Englander, as many have done in recent decades, they have an inherent advantage over a church that employs a pastor from another region. A New Englander intuitively understands the culture and ethos that is unique to the region. Call this the BCNE Indigenous Principle.
A Massachusetts native, Neal Davidson is a case in point. Realizing that “God requires faithfulness, not success,” he has served since 2002 as senior pastor of Hope Chapel in the Worcester suburb of Sterling. Twenty years after building their first worship center, they are expanding so they can reach effectively more adults and children with the gospel. The new building will double the chapel’s capacity and allow the present worship room to become a youth-focused multi-use space.
Terry Dorsett (left) visited Neal Davidson on the construction site. The new building will double Hope Chapel’s capacity.
“God is doing exciting things in New England. Hope Chapel in Sterling is undergoing a massive building project to more than double the size of its building so they can reach more people for Christ. Pastor Neal Davidson is also deeply committed to planting new churches and is sponsoring new ethnic churches across the region even in the midst of this massive building expansion project,” Dorsett wrote on LinkedIn.
A pastor who arrives in the region from elsewhere (which was the predominant church-planting model when what is now the BCNE network of some 400 churches commenced on August 17, 1958), will have a better opportunity to grow the church into a healthy fellowship of Christ-followers when the pastor articulates the adopted culture and commits to growing in place—over the long haul. Call this the BCNE Longevity Principle.
Consider the example of an immigrant from Brazil, José Monteiro, the founder and bivocational pastor of Igreja Comunidade Batista de Naugatuck (First Brazilian Baptist Church of Naugatuck), in Connecticut. He will commemorate the church’s 30th anniversary on June 28.
As reported by the BCNE News Service, he has lived a lifetime of Christ-centered obedience on the path God set for him since preaching his first sermon when he was 12 years old.
José Monteiro
Being the spiritual leader of a congregation of immigrants is not an easy task because many church members move away as often as they arrive in Naugatuck as they seek improved employment opportunities, closer family connections, or a better way of life in a new hemisphere.
Monteiro is one of the longest-serving Brazilian pastors in the BCNE and he has no plans to slow down or relocate unless God should decide to call him elsewhere. By living a faithful life transplanted in New England soil, he has found true joy in ministry.
Understanding New England History
Being a truly New England Baptist church means embracing the region’s church history, which predates and coincides with the birth of the United States.
English Baptists got their start on the North American continent when Roger Williams, an English-born New England minister and theologian, was expelled by the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In what is now called Providence, Rhode Island, he gathered the First Baptist Church in America, in 1638, on the bedrock of religious liberty, with its principles of soul freedom and the separation of church and state.
Decades later First Baptist Church, Charleston, South Carolina, the earliest Baptist church in the South was organized on September 25, 1682, in Kittery, Maine, under the sponsorship of the First Baptist Church of Boston. Late in 1696, the pastor, William Screven, and twenty-eight members of the Kittery congregation immigrated to Charleston.
For more on the Christian history of New England, study the Pilgrims, the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards, the First Great Awakening, Charles Finney, George Whitefield, the Second Great Awakening, the Haystack Prayer Meeting, Adoniram Judson, Dwight L. Moody and, of course, Luther Rice, whose boyhood farm in Northborough, Massachusetts, is now the BCNE Multiplication Center offices.
You may also want to get a copy of Exploring New England’s Spiritual Heritage: Seven Day Trips for Contemporary Pilgrims (2019) and schedule a BCNE-sponsored Spiritual Heritage Tour.
BCNE’s Oldest Congregations
A century after Williams relocated to what became Providence and four decades after Screven departed Kittery for Charleston, Benjamin Marsh, a founder of Sutton, Massachusetts, started holding worship as First Baptist Church in that rural village, on September 9, 1735, and served as its first pastor. Strategically located in the heart of the Blackstone Valley between Worcester and Rhode Island, Legacy Church, as it has been called for nearly a decade, is known as the oldest active Baptist church in Worcester County and the fourth oldest active in Massachusetts.
Church history is coming alive this summer in a fresh way at Legacy Church. To reflect its current character and to celebrate its 290th anniversary, the current pastor, West Roxbury native Donald McKinnon, led members and friends, on May 10, to dedicate a former Sunday School room and nursery as the Benjamin Marsh Museum. About seventy people attended the dedication service at which 18th and 19th-century refreshments were served.
Some four dozen historical documents are framed and wall-mounted in the 120-square-foot space, and display cases exhibit old books and registers with details of the church’s history. “A television also displays photos and documents, so people can get a good view of new and old pictures and see the history of the church through the years. We have items that were donated over the years by families including old offering plates and communion sets. We even have a couple of baseball hats because, in the back of our church, we have a baseball field that for years was the traditional home of the Sutton Little League,” said McKinnon.
The museum, or “history room” as some prefer to label it, was created by dedicated mission volunteers Robbie and Marilyn May of Port Huron, Michigan, who connected with Legacy Church almost two years ago. “I got convicted by the Lord to do something part-time on the mission field,” said Robbie.
Robbie retired as a high school social studies teacher. He received a master’s degree in history from Oakland University. Marilyn retired as a special education elementary school teacher. They searched short-term mission options online and found a link that listed current projects in New England that the Baptists on Mission of North Carolina published online.
Mission volunteers Robbie and Marilyn May of Port Huron, Michigan, created a history museum for First Baptist Church of Marlborough.
They volunteered to be prayer walkers and “pastor encouragers” somewhere in New England and soon connected with McKinnon in Sutton and with Logan Loveday, pastor of First Baptist Church of Marlborough, Massachusetts. The couple found an outlet for their love of history as they talked with the pastors and discovered that they both wanted to open church-based museums.
Loveday, a South Carolinian with close family ties to BCNE and no desire to depart New England for a warmer climate, became pastor of the struggling congregation and was invited to merge it with Hope Community Church, the BCNE-affiliated fellowship he planted in town in 2017.
Like every congregation, First Baptist of Marlborough has an origin story worthy of being remembered with a museum. It started in the years immediately following the Civil War when, the church’s history reports, the “first hope of Baptist interest” in what was just a village of some 8,500 residents began. A home prayer group organized themselves as a church with nineteen charter members on April 14, 1868.
The Mays created the Marlborough history room and dedicated it to the glory of God on May 17, a week after they had dedicated the Sutton church museum. Even before the dedication, interest in the Marlborough museum was surging; response on the church’s Facebook event showed that some 300 people marked themselves as “interested.” Seventy people attended in person.
When the Mays called Loveday about the history room idea, the pastor reportedly said, “Well, we’ve got archives, but they’re not put together. We want to display them in such a way that it’s a museum. We've already got the room set aside. It’s all set up. We just need to put this together.”
Christ Church, Charlestown, Massachusetts, founded in 1632—just two years after Boston itself was founded—is the oldest church now affiliated with the BCNE. The Congregationalists were served by more than thirty 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, as the New England Baptist News Service reported in 2023, the church joined with BCNE but came to a crossroads when the pastor decided to move out of state.
Rather than turn the building into a history museum, a bicycle shop, or a bookstore, as has happened to many old New England church facilities, Christ Church members decided to donate the building to their current pastor, J. D. Mangrum. “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,” he said.
In conclusion, “knowing history humbles God’s people and clarifies what they are to do: preach the gospel, build up one another in the faith, and trust the Lord for fruit—just as generations of believers have always done,” wrote Forrest C. Strickland, an adjunct professor of history at Boyce College, in “Why Your Local Church’s History Should Matter to Your Church Members.”