Home meetings part of new Orono congregation’s style

ORONO – Since its first service Easter Sunday, a new congregation has almost doubled in size, organized a praise band and hired a full-time pastor. It appears to be succeeding in drawing a mix of university faculty, staff and students as well as Orono residents to services at the community center on Bennoch Road.

“To us what’s most important is a relationship God, with each other and with the community,” said Douglas Palmeter, campus director of Campus Crusade for Christ at the nearby University of Maine and a founder of Orono Community Church.

“We are a church that respects the Bible and treats it as true. We’re offering spiritual growth to the community and a service with contemporary music,” Palmeter said.

Palmeter, described by several church leaders as the “spark plug” of the congregation, has been in ministry 25 years, 15 of them at the university. During his years in Orono, he said, it has been difficult waiting for the right combination of people to come together so the church could succeed and grow.

“We didn’t want to push people, so we had to be patient to get the core families who could make this really work,” he said. “The biggest challenge over the years has been to be patient and wait for things to develop in God’s time.”

Like other evangelical churches, Orono Community Church is organized into worship teams that hold home meetings in the community. The team approach, according to Palmeter, helps spread out the workload and responsibility of the church’s ministry and should keep founders and the new minister from burning out.

“We needed to bring together the right people to form the teams to carry out the desires for what we want to do,” he said. “The home groups is where a lot of the meat of the work of church takes place.”

OCC is the only church in town that is not part of a mainline denomination. Other congregations include St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church, Orono United Methodist Church, the Church of Universal Fellowship and Faith Baptist Church.

In addition to Campus Crusade for Christ, the Roman Catholic Newman Center and the Protestant Wilson Center are next to the UM campus on College Avenue. Non-Christian religions also are well represented at the university.

Before the Orono Community Church began holding services in town, Palmeter, his family and students seeking a more contemporary approach to worship often traveled 15 miles south to Hampden to attend services at Church of the Open Door.

The Rev. Carl Bergman, a church planter for the Christian Reform Church, arrived Sept. 1. Over the past seven years, he has helped start new churches in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. He is committed to contemporary worship techniques that include a band playing Christian music and PowerPoint presentations to explain Bible passages and project the words of songs on the back wall of the stage at the community center.

Nearly half the worshippers on a given Sunday morning are children under 12 or college students.

Services are at 10 a.m. Sundays in the Keith Anderson Community Center, 8 Bennoch Road, Orono. For information, call 866-2605.