’97 productive for religious community> New faces, places mark busy year

While the largest percentage of Americans in a decade professed a belief in God and angels worked miracles on weekly TV shows, religious leaders in Maine wrestled with ways to meet the needs of their congregations and sought methods of attracting young seekers who feel no denominational affiliation. Churches here are facing difficult decisions due to rising insurance costs, decreased financial support from members, increased secular demands of clergy and meeting the needs and expectations of traditionalists as well as church-goers turned off by ritual.

The Rev. Susan Hassinger, bishop of the United Methodist Church for the Boston area, said in September that Christianity is undergoing its most significant change since the Reformation. Boundaries between the church and the world are porous and ambiguous, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, she observed. Congregations are no longer defined by geography or family tradition, and a church’s mission begins at its front door.

Area churches sought to address these changes in different ways during 1996. The Winterport United Methodist Church held its final service June 22 and the more than 100-year-old white steepled building is for sale. Other United Methodist congregations merged to form new entities. In Augusta, the St. Paul Retreat Center, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was closed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate due to the high cost of maintaining the 1901 mansion and the dwindling number of priests and brothers in the order.

One small Lutheran church in Aroostook County found a creative way to solve its seemingly unending problem of finding and keeping a part-time pastor. The Rev. James Morgan, a retired Navy chaplain and an ordained Episcopal minister, is serving Trinity Lutheran Church in Stockholm in a unique and complicated agreement between the two denominations despite the failure of the Concordat of Agreement on a national level, which would have allowed “full communion” between the two Protestant faiths.

Diversity and growth marked the year. An Eastern Orthodox bookstore and mission opened in downtown Bangor. Muslims prepared to fast for Ramadan and to build the region’s first mosque and Islamic Center in Orono. The area’s first Wesleyan church celebrated its growth from 30 to 80 attendees in a little more than a year at an informal service in a Hogan Road motel over Labor Day weekend. The Standing Bear Shamanic Center opened in Surry. Sant Mat practitioners joined for group meditation at a Bangor bookstore.

Churches helped keep area construction workers busy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opened a $1.5 million addition in Bangor as it celebrated the sesquicentennial of the founding of its religious headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bangor’s Hammond Street Congregational Church and Orono’s United Fellowship Church restored their historic clock steeples.

Just last week Presque Isle’s Grant Memorial United Methodist Church held its first service in its new home. Almost two years after its 100-year-old building was destroyed by arson, the congregation gathered to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ as well as its own rebirth from bitter ashes.

Mainers’ faith led them to places as far away as Brazil, Paris, Eastern Europe and the nation’s capital, while a group from Tennessee sojourned north to complete work on the Penobscot Christian School. Mary Dass, formerly of Hampden, ministers to hundreds of young people who live on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. There she met her husband Stephen. Catholic teen-agers from Maine were among the thousands who braved crushing crowds and oppressive August heat to attend Pope John Paul II’s World Youth Day in the French capital.

Men from the area joined the large October Promise Keepers rally in Washington, D.C., seeking “fellowship with other brothers in Christ.” Local participants described it as a religious rather than political event, expressing a desire to support and share responsibilities with their wives, rather than dominate them, as feminists had charged.

Manna Ministries, along with Dale Dixon, a local television news anchor, traveled to Bistrita, Romania, where they set up a soup kitchen in the former Communist country. The goal of the mission, according to Bill Rae, Manna’s executive director, was to teach local residents to run the center without government support or interference.

It was not the lobster or the black flies that convinced members of the Athens (Tenn.) First Baptist Church to travel 1,300 miles to Maine early in July. It was Bangor’s only Southern Baptist congregation, River City Baptist Church, and the Bangor-based independent Penobscot Christian School that caused them to pack up their tools and spend a week working on an addition to the building now used by both organizations.

Changes in leadership marked 1997. For the first time in history, a woman was elected to lead the state’s 20,000 Episcopalians. The Rev. Canon Chilton R. Knudsen was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine in November. She will be installed in May, replacing the Right Rev. Edward C. Chalfant who was forced to resign in 1996 when allegations were made of an abuse of power.

As the new bishop was being selected, the Rev. Kevin Holsapple was packing to leave Newfoundland for his new pastorate at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Bangor. Born and raised in Dexter, he called his first service in the 162-year-old church “a homecoming.”

Bangor area Roman Catholics celebrated the 125th anniversary of St. Mary’s Church, the ordination of the Rev. Scott Mower, formerly a Methodist, and the arrival of the Rev. Richard O’Brien, who serves St. John’s and St. Mary’s parishes in Bangor and lives at St. Theresa’s and eats at St. Joseph’s in Brewer. But Catholics mourned the sudden loss of the Rev. Ronald Schmit, the 49-year-old pastor at St. Joseph’s, who died following heart surgery.

Congregation Beth Israel, home to Bangor’s Conservative Jews, lost its rabbi of 15 years when Joseph Schonberger left for Youngstown, Ohio, in August. While a majority of the congregation supported the rabbi, he refused the three-year offer from the synagogue’s board. He had wanted a longer contract, according to board members. Across the street at Congregation Beth Abraham, Rabbi Henry Isaacs celebrated 36 years as leader of the Orthodox congregation and said he has no plans to retire.

But no member of the clergy made the dynamic entrance the way the Rev. Elaine Hewes did when she took over the reins of Bangor’s only Lutheran Church. Members of the largest African-American Lutheran Church on the East Coast, Reformation in Philadelphia, journeyed north to celebrate Hewes’ installation in song. The Rev. Ansley Throckmorton, president of Bangor Theological Seminary, pegged the event one of the largest ecumenical gatherings in the city’s history, and one that will not be soon forgotten by those in attendance.

National and international debates on theological issues were discussed in academic, religious and secular settings. Actions in the Israeli parliament stirred the embers of the ancient debate over who is a Jew. Local rabbis spoke from the bima (pulpit) on the Knesset’s decision to refuse automatic citizenship to those converted to Judaism by Conservative or Reform rabbis as the nation previously had.

As the debate continued through Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and into December, Laurence Milder, rabbi of Bangor’s Reform temple, Congregation Beth El, stated that no families in his congregation celebrated both Christmas and Hannukah, even though more than 50 percent of those who attend the synagogue are in mixed marriages.

Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story on the issues facing couples in mixed faith relationships. Maine first lady Mary Herman lighted a moose menorah at the Blaine House and shipped a Maine Christmas tree to her Jewish mother living in Florida.

The new year looks to be filled with as much change, controversy and diversity as the last. The seminary’s annual convocation will move from a discussion of the historical Jesus to “Christianity in a Post-Christian Age”; the Maine Council of Churches will launch an educational and advocacy program on environmental issues; Messiah Baptist Church at last will move into its new home after a three-year battle in two municipalities; and the Feb. 10 vote on whether to repeal the gay rights bill will be discussed in churches across the landscape.

Maine, like the nation, is in the grips of a paradigm shift so new it has not even been named, according to Hassinger. “We (churches) are the only institution expected to serve people from infancy through death,” she said. “… To survive in the new paradigm, churches must be willing to try new things, risk the trends and not be afraid to fail.”

With 71 percent of the population reporting that it never doubts the existence of God, religion and faith are playing a bigger role in people’s everyday lives than has been reported in decades. How that role will be fulfilled into the millennium is the unanswered question.