In Historic Move, New England Baptists Elect a Brazilian “Pastor With a Missionary Heart” as President
Pastor Lierte Soares preaches the Annual Sermon at the 2023 BCNE Annual Meeting
The Baptist Churches of New England made history November 4 when they elected Lierte Soares Jr., a Massachusetts pastor from Brazil, as their president. By a unanimous vote, the self-proclaimed “reverse missionary” to New England, who also calls himself a “pastor with a missionary heart,” became the first Brazilian state-convention president in the 178-year history of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the United States.
His election was held during a two-day annual worship and business meeting in Manchester, NH, and came fourteen decades after the predominantly White mission-focused denomination dispatched their first missionaries to one of the world’s powerhouse countries. William and Anne Bagby, an online source states, “are to Brazil what Lottie Moon is to China.” Since that humble start, the Brazilian Baptist Convention (Convençáo Batista Brasileira) has grown dramatically to more than 9,000 churches and 1.8 million members
Nearly two hundred representatives from fifty churches made a little more Baptist history when BCNE Executive Director Terry W. Dorsett signed an agreement with Claiton A. Kunz, director of Faculdade Batista Pioneira, Ijui, RS, and author of As Ações Parabólicas de Jesus no Evangelho de Marcos (2021). The Brazilian seminary he leads will play a central role in organizing the BCNE’s new Multiplication Center beginning in January. Soares will be the Center’s director; Rick Harrington, pastor of First Baptist Church, Haverhill, MA, has been named provost; and Sandra Coelho, BCNE’s longtime Leadership Development Coordinator, will be involved in the Center’s development.
The hybrid Center will provide a venue for participants in the region and worldwide to “engage and experience ministry in New England and overseas [and] learn how to do missions locally and globally through the lens of the New England context.” The Center will offer nine-month, non-degree training and summer ministry internships. The Center is being launched in 2024 to better “reflect on the future of our convention,” Soares comments, “because there is a shortage of pastors” in the region.
The BCNE wants to discover and prepare the next generation of Indigenous church leaders. It is “not a seminary or a school of ministry but a program to go deeper into missiology . . . so that we can find the future leadership of our churches and help our present leaders think missionally.”
“This is very special for us. We’re very thankful that God has given me this opportunity to serve our people in New England and in the SBC,” said Soares, who is the founder in 2015 and pastor of Framingham Baptist Church, a multicultural, bilingual, urban faith community of 200 people including many “third-culture kids” and families in Boston’s MetroWest suburbs.
“Being a pastor is the highest calling any man can have. It is my calling and part of my life. I love to serve.” When asked to estimate the time he spends in ministry, which he accomplishes with steady support from his wife, Anna, an elementary school teacher, and their two children, Soares estimates that he works an average of eighty hours a week—and most days he still has energy to spare. He “wants to see revival come to America again. Maybe I will not see it, but I will try my best to plant seeds for the next generation to see this. I wish I could do more.”
A year ago, Soares, who is 44, was asked to pastor a second congregation, New Life Community Church, in Georgetown, MA, which he says is a “legacy church [with a] culture of disability” that opened its doors in 1785. The 60-member fellowship “ensure(s) that people with disabilities are loved, included, and able to serve” their neighbors. He preaches Sunday mornings in Georgetown, on Boston’s North Shore, and Sunday nights at the Framingham church.
He understands being a “reverse missionary” in New England as an opportunity to “pay back the love to a nation that brought the gospel to us [in Brazil]. What motivates me is gratitude because we once were a mission field and now we have become a mission force.” He calls Massachusetts “the oldest Brazilian community in the United States.”
A risk-taker who is goal-oriented, Soares says his most important task as president is to promote unity in a diverse convention in six states with 388 churches, more than half of which are “non-Anglo”—what sociologists and city planners call a “majority-minority” population. The Research Division of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, for instance, reported in 2014 that, “In 1970, close to 70% of Boston’s population was white. Today, whites comprise only 47% of the city’s population, making Boston a ‘majority-minority’ city for the second consecutive Census.” The population shift in New England’s urban centers has only increased since the report was published.
Dr. Terry Dorsett prays over the newly elected BCNE President and Vice President at the 2023 Annual Meeting
Soares, Dorsett, and other BCNE leaders including the Board of Directors “need to make our annual meeting more appealing” to immigrant-focused churches, young adults, and the “new church plants that are more involved with NAMB [the North American Mission Board] than they are with BCNE. We need to build a bridge to bring everybody together. It’s a new season and a new challenge. We have a job to think about what our annual meeting [and state convention] will look like” in the years ahead.
Before migrating to the United States in 2014, with strong encouragement from Bobby Ready, senior pastor of River of Life Worship Center, Port Vincent, LA, Soares was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, Valadares, MG, Brazil (2004-14), an alderman on the City Council of Governador Valadares, MG (2004-12), a professor at Minas Gerais Theological College, Belo Horizonte (2005-06), and an English Teacher at Yazigi Internexus, Governador Valadares (1998-2003).
In New England, he was BCNE’s Ethnic Evangelism Consultant (2015-18) and Church Planting Committee chairman (2019-22), as well as Senior Pastor of Precision Valley Baptist Church, Springfield, VT, (2016-22). The BCNE recognized Soares in 2017 with the Ray Allen Missions and Evangelism Excellence Award. He serves the SBC as a Committee on Nominations vice chairman.
He received a Bachelor of Arts in Theology from Faculdade de Teologia Integrada, Recife, Brazil (2010) and a Master of Theological Studies with a Concentration in Cross-Cultural Missions from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX (2022). In addition to a full schedule of ministry, he is currently earning a Doctor of Ministry in Missions and Evangelism from Southwestern Seminary. His DMin research project is on the ministry of Framingham Baptist Church.
A Massachusetts native and a New England Baptist since 1970, Dan Nicholas is the BCNE managing editor.