Stamford Community Church, a Gospel-Focused Fellowship in Rural Vermont, Joins the BCNE Nexus as Its 400th Church
“That is awesome!” proclaimed Jim LaMothe, pastor of Stamford Community Church, when he learned that his community-focused congregation in rural Southwestern Vermont, some fifteen miles “on the other side of the mountain” from historic Bennington, had become the four-hundredth church to join the Baptist Churches of New England nexus. The Board of Directors approved their application for membership at its March meeting.
In the measured way that a New Englander expresses excitement, the native of Southwick, a town in Southwestern Massachusetts, responded to the news by stating: “I haven’t told the congregation yet because I was waiting. I know you had mentioned it earlier, but they’ll think that it’s cool, too. Yep, 400!”
Being the four-hundredth BCNE member, he noted, “is symbolic of how God has moved on New England, especially considering that it hasn’t been all that long” since Southern Baptists came North to plant their evangelistic, Bible-focused style of churches in the predominantly Roman Catholic region’s spiritually rocky soil.
“From what I understand,” he added, “especially [in recent] years, it’s really begun to grow exponentially. I’m encouraged that God has moved, is moving, and will continue moving on New England—because it needs it.”
Pointing People to Christ by Serving Neighbors
LaMothe said he tries “to remain neutral” when the divisive topics driven by partisan politics are discussed. “I have my own personal convictions, but as far as the town is concerned, I want to be able to minister to everybody. I try to point people to Christ; that’s what my job is as a pastor— pointing people to Christ. If I become political and point to one party or the other, I’m already excluding half the town that’s not even going to want to talk to me.”
“I’m very conservative in my theology. So, I believe in trying to preach the full counsel of God’s word. . . . I’m always trying to make sure I give people the full picture,” said Jim LaMothe, pastor of Stamford Community Church.
“I'm proud of my church because of the family that they’ve become and the way that they look out for each other, the way that they pray for each other, the way that they’re pretty much a tight knit community” of between sixty and eighty people on Sundays, LaMothe said. “Sometimes we have to flash the lights to get them out of the church. They just enjoy being around each other so much. That’s the kind of community we’ve created, or that the Holy Spirit has created, actually. We really are a loving community.”
The church web page describes them as “a group of people who are simply trying to follow Jesus, grow in faith, and encourage one another along the way.” To illustrate the point, Easter this year featured a sunrise worship, a potluck breakfast and a second worship.
He has prayed about how best to serve his neighbors in the farming community of 861 people (2020 census). “I’ve asked the Lord, ‘What can I do to reach the town of Stamford?’ And he’s given me a couple good answers, and it’s worked every time. Of course, when you do what the Lord calls you to do, it always works.”
In response to God’s leading, Pastor Jim LaMothe cooks for senior lunches each month. “I thought, if I did something to bring people together, it couldn’t hurt, and that’s what I felt the Lord was calling us to do.”
Food was a big part of the divine answer. In response to God’s leading, LaMothe started cooking for a senior lunch “because the town was so divided. I thought, if I did something to bring people together, it couldn’t hurt, and that’s what I felt the Lord was calling us to do.” He loves to cook, so a free lunch each month for senior adults seemed like a great plan. It “started out with eight or ten people, and now we get forty coming every month. Every month I’m meeting people whom I would have never met otherwise.”A similar lunch is held monthly for the general public.
It’s likely that John 4:34, which says “Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (KJV) has resonance for LaMothe. (The NIV and ESV translations replaces “meat” with “food” and the NLT says “nourishment.”) He did not become a pastor until he was in his 40s; he is now 60 years old. Before that he was a meat cutter and then a meat manager for Big Y supermarkets. “I opened up new meat departments for them. They were building a lot of new stores at the time. But, I think I got to the point where the Lord made me dislike that job so much because of the stress that I quit and finally surrendered to the call” of God to a life of pastoral ministry.
“Life was tough for me. By the time I was twenty years old, I was full of anxiety and depression, and I actually was suicidal. A friend of my uncle married a woman, and her sister was going to the Assemblies of God in Agawam [Massachusetts]. She began to share the gospel with me and I ended up receiving Jesus when I was twenty-two years old,” he said. “All of that depression and anxiety went away when I began to serve the Lord.”
When LaMothe was 37, in 2008, he graduated from Zion Bible College (a Pentecostal school now called Northpoint Bible College, Haverhill, Massachusetts.) He was called fifteen years ago to be pastor of the Stamford church, which is dually aligned with the American Baptist Churches of Vermont and New Hampshire; that was before he could complete online study for a Christian counseling graduate degree from Liberty University.
Stamford Community Church “pretty well aligns with Southern Baptist doctrine, and I know that the doctrine of the [BCNE] is pretty much on the conservative spectrum,” the pastor observed. “I’m very conservative in my theology. So, I believe in trying to preach the full counsel of God’s word, even the things that are hard to preach. I preach through a [Bible] book, because it forces me sometimes to cover some of the things I might avoid. I’m always trying to make sure I give people the full picture.”
LaMothe is the point person and often a cook for the BCNE-Vermont monthly pastors’ gathering in the Bennington area. “I check with Jim and he gets the word out. He has been doing this for about three years now. When he makes food for our gathering, it is better than anything I have had catered. We’re blessed to have him and the church on board,” said Russ Rathier, the BCNE’s Vermont Regional Coordinator.
LaMothe has volunteered at the Northeastern Baptist College library, so he hosts the monthly gathering there. “He slowly saw the value of the equipping, encouragement, and partnering he was receiving from the BCNE. He asked last year how they could affiliate, and they voted at the beginning of this year to affiliate,” added Rathier.
Historical Roots of a Growing Church Nexus
Once a mostly white and close-knit gathering of like-minded transplants with accents that are still unusual in rural corners of New England, the “Baptist General Association of New England,” then just a branch of the Baptists in Maryland, has mushroomed into a multiethnic nexus of fellowships and small groups that worship in twenty-five of the 100+ languages spoken across the six-state area.
Early New England Baptist leaders. Elmer Sizemore, executive director, 1958-77, and his wife, Jean, (left); and James Currin, executive director, 1978-92, and his wife, Marge. Photos are from Merwyn Borders, The Circle Comes Full (1998).
“While English is the primary language, over 100 languages are spoken in New England, reflecting a diverse population where roughly twenty percent of residents speak a language other than English at home. Major non-English languages include Spanish, Portuguese, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese,” according to a Reddit article.
“Four hundred churches! A milestone for Baptist Churches of New England,” commented Merwyn Borders, a Kentuckian who moved in the 1960s to Northborough, Massachusetts, to become the pastor of Rice Memorial Baptist Church when there were just a few Southern Baptist churches in the region. Later he became the director in Vermont of what was then called the Green Mountain Baptist Association.
The author of The Circle Comes Full: New England Southern Baptists, 1958-1998, Borders is BCNE’s unofficial historian. He recently reflected in an email on how the BCNE “journey began February 22, 1960, when the first Southern Baptist- affiliated church, Screven Memorial Baptist Church, was formed in Newington, New Hampshire.”
Watch Merwyn Borders’s inspiring conversation with Robbie Pitt, BCNE Pastoral Leadership Development Director. They discussed Borders’s “call to New England in the 1960s and the decades that followed—years marked by faithful service, church planting, mentoring leaders, and investing deeply in people. His story is one of perseverance, joy, sacrifice, and a life shaped by obedience to God’s call.”
The lead pastor of the first BCNE church planted in the region, now known as Seacoast Community Church, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is Ademi Mirabal, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, who grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, and “did not come to know the Lord as savior” until he read the Book of Hosea. [For more on this history, read “Remembering Sixty-Five Years of New England Baptist Ministry and Moving Ahead by God’s Grace” (2023)].
Quoting from Numbers (23:23b, NIV), Borders and his wife, Linda, now retired in Kingsland, Georgia, concluded with an apt Bible verse: “See what God has done!”
National Recognition of BCNE’s Exponential Growth
The BCNE’s exponential growth, which is sometimes expressed as unity in diversity, has been receiving significant media attention in Baptist circles.
“New England was the only region of the U.S. where Southern Baptist churches grew from 2018 to 2023. Churches in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont grew by 10%. Every other region saw declines in overall church membership,” Lifeway Research reported a year ago.
“Southern Baptist churches in New England have 10,000 more people attending worship now than they did a decade ago,” Baptist Press (BP) reported February 12, as the first sentence of a national story,’Emerging regions of SBC see growth in baptisms, giving.’”
BCNE Executive Director Terry Dorsett responded on LinkedIn to the BP article by attributing the growth of New England Baptist churches to God deciding “to show us his favor” and to the BCNE staff, which has “worked really hard to mobilize our non-English-speaking churches.”
“Most of our growth is coming from non-English-speaking churches.” BCNE is a “majority-minority” network of churches.
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“We’re no longer just all white people,” Dorsett told BP. “We have two Egyptians, two Brazilians, and a Haitian on our staff, which is becoming multiethnic, and that focus is allowing us to get deeper into these non-English-speaking churches. We’re finding that many times, these people are far more responsive to the gospel than some of the native New Englanders who’ve been here for generations.”
“Our neighbors,” especially recent immigrants to the region, often “need a neighbor to help them navigate the nuances of New England,” Dorsett stated in his report at the BCNE annual meeting in November 2023. “In the last thirty years,” he said, “two million internationals have moved to New England and at least 100 languages are spoken across the region,” the New England Baptist News Service reported.