Pastor’s path leads to Bangor congregation

loading...

BANGOR – Pilgrim Orthodox Presbyterian Church is a singing congregation.

During a Sunday evening service, the voices of the members rise to the apex of the A-frame sanctuary on Mount Hope Avenue. There, they mingle and blend in spontaneous harmony until the notes float down over worshippers like a warm and gentle rain.

The Rev. Brian Nolder sits at the grand piano on the altar. Sometimes, the pastor stops playing and leaves his congregation on its own, singing a cappella. They sound as if they spent the previous week practicing together.

Nolder does not find that surprising.

“A lot of it is that we really believe what we are singing,” says the 34-year-old pastor. “Therefore, we may do it more enthusiastically than a lot of other congregations. … We are a friendly congregation, a generous congregation, but we are serious about what the Gospel means for our lives.”

Nolder became pastor of Bangor’s only Presbyterian church in July. The small denomination was formed in 1936 when a small group broke away from the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. The Bangor church was organized in 1953.

He was raised in Columbus, Ohio, and attended a Lutheran church in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America denomination. Nolder says his life changed dramatically when he was attending college at Ohio State University.

“I was catechized, confirmed and quit the Lutheran church, all within three years,” he recalls. “But when I was a freshman, I found I didn’t really understand what it meant to be Christian and had a dramatic conversion experience.”

Nolder had entered college intending to be a journalist. His religious awakening lead him back to classical music, which he had abandoned in high school. He majored in music.

It was while he was on a mission to China with Campus Crusade for Christ that he first heard the call to the ministry. A friend in his hometown introduced him to Orthodox Presbyterianism and theology that Nolder describes as “consistently biblical.”

Nolder graduated from theological school in 1997 and served an internship in Wheaton, Ill. The pastor there was from Dixfield, and he regaled Nolder and his wife, Sally, with stories of Maine.

While Nolder was preparing for the ministry, the Rev. Jonathan Falk was contemplating leaving his position as pastor at Orthodox Presbyterian and returning to Africa as a full-time teacher and missionary. He and his family left Bangor in the summer of 1999.

During a 1998 interview, Falk said that he met his first Ugandan in 1978 in the seminary. The man had escaped the brutal regime of dictator Maj. Gen. Idi Amin. Falk first visited Africa in 1986, the year he became pastor in Bangor.

In 1998, Falk spent six weeks teaching preaching and ministering in Mbales, a city of 35,000 located in eastern Uganda. He returned there 18 months ago with his wife and three children to train native men as ministers.

“God’s opened a wonderful door for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Uganda,” says Nolder of his colleague’s work. “We are sending the first missionaries into the northern part of the country now.”

Nolder’s focus, however, remains on his flock of more than 150 who usually attend Sunday morning services. He says that he “enjoys studying, teaching, and being able to communicate and help people see how good God is to us and how great he is.”

The job also comes with many challenges, most of which Nolder sees as cultural rather than specific to his congregation.

“We live in a culture that isolates us in the community when we are living lives consistent with the Gospel,” he says. “Christians today are living in a culture that is increasingly hostile to Christianity.”

Nolder does not believe that the rise of Christian music or the high ratings garnered by television shows such as “Touched by an Angel” are particularly meaningful.

“My concern with so-called Christian entertainment is that, for the most part, it is a baptized version of the Word – I recently heard it referred to as ‘Baptized Britney [Spears]’ and I agree,” he says. “There may be a lot of talk in the culture about spirituality, but I don’t think that’s the same as Christianity.”

Nolder witnesses the struggled between members of his congregation and the culture every day. He is especially concerned about how it affects the more than a dozen members of the church youth group.

He said that one of the reasons the church has such a relatively large and active youth group is that teen-age members function as adults.

“They see that adult members have respect for their Christian growth,” he says. “We help them develop their viewpoint and don’t just let these kids drift away, but ask them to become contributing members of the congregation, and [they] can vote at meetings.”

Most of the youth group members have grown up in the church, but 17-year-old Shawn McCrum of Bangor has been attending only six months. Although he started coming to church with his girlfriend, he found at Pilgrim something he had been missing.

“I started hearing God’s words here,” the Bangor High School student says. “It has been helping me with the struggle of changing my life. My family don’t attend church, but they are supportive of me.”

McCrum likes the pastor’s sermons, the way he plans them out like lessons and how Nolder stays focused.

Erin Lancaster, 17, of Bangor says that the youth group helps her stay focused. The group meets once a week for breakfast before school.

“Being in a public high school, surrounded by secular things,” observes Lancaster, “it’s good to be in a group like this with other believers.”

That is one of the reasons Pilgrim was founded nearly half a century ago – so that people could worship with like-minded believers and hear the word of God interpreted for them each Sunday.

This year, they are grateful that the call Nolder first heard halfway around the world in China led him to a small church in the heart of Maine.

Services at Pilgrim Orthodox Presbyterian Church are held at 10:30 a.m. or 6 p.m. Sundays. For information, call 942-8054. The Web site, www.pilgrimobc.org, is scheduled to be online next month.