By Bruce Dent
Fewer residents of Maine identify themselves as religious than those of almost any other state—only New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts are less religious—according to a 2016 study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Only 34 percent of the adult population in Maine consider religion to be an important part of their life.
This lack of religiosity has proven challenging for religious institutions throughout the state, with many churches facing declining membership. But Crosspoint Church, a large Baptist church in Bangor, has managed to buck the trend by modernizing and focusing on youth and families.
In the early 2010s, Westboro Baptist Church, a radical Baptist church from Kansas came into the national spotlight for its protests of the legalization of marriage equality. Since the early 1990s, its members have been picketing events for the LGBT community, military funerals and abortion clinics.
“We just kept getting more and more people saying, ‘Are you the same group as this group?’ And we just decided it was time to just have a more seeker-friendly name where the more people can relate to who we are,” said Pencil Boone, the Pastor of Youth Ministries. The church, long known as Bangor Baptist Church, changed its name to Crosspoint Church. Though the name changed, it remains an evangelical Baptist church that focuses primarily on biblical teaching.
In addition to changing its name, the church began to focus on new families. Today most of the services at the church are produced in a contemporary style with music performed by the Crosspoint Christian rock band and choir. Although the churchgoers appear stoic, at the Easter service many were clapping and swaying to the music. Every Sunday, three services attract a total average of about 1,000.
Crosspoint has added other family amenities, such as a Tim Horton’s and a nursery on campus. Before and after services the Tim Horton’s is open, and people can purchase coffee, donuts or the Crosspoint Church worship team’s CD. These family amenities have offered a way for the community to mitigate some of the issues of the 2nd Congressional District, such as the opioid crisis and unemployment.
In 2009 Crosspoint founded Thrive Student Ministries, a youth ministry program run by Boone. Before working at Crosspoint, Boone was a missionary broadcaster working on the Isle of Bonaire, in the southern Caribbean; Swaziland and Melbourne, Australia.
The youth ministry offers a venue for high school and college students to worship and learn about their religion. Over the past years, the program transitioned part of its focus from the students to service. When the student ministry was started, it was initially “all about the kids,” explained Boone. Now the mission is about “the people that live outside these walls that are in great need,” Boone said.
This transition has led to the creation of student mission trips. For the past seven years, youth in the church have left their local community to serve those in need. These trips began with missions to foreign countries, but the legal liability was more than the church wanted to take on. “So we decided why not get the same type of exposure in a major city. So we have been to Philadelphia three times, inner-city Boston three times and this year we’re going to Detroit,” Boone said.
These trips are designed to offer the students the ability to serve those in need. For some students, this ministry offers them a first opportunity to leave the state and explore another part of the country.
At a time when church-going Maine has dwindled, Crosspoint appears to have figured out how to offer its members an important base of support.
“Less than 4 percent of the [Maine] population goes to church on any given Sunday. And so we’re a real anomaly,” said Boone. Ken Walsh, the CEO of the Alfond Center in Waterville, a joint Boys & Girls Club and YMCA that serves children throughout the 2nd Congressional district, noted that “on the economic scale is that they have less people going to their churches and therefore they’ve lost resources and there are different issues they have to deal with.”
Walsh said he believed that churches and religion are important for both the development of children and the health of a community. “There is a core of respect and right and wrong…to understand that to hurt somebody else is not the right thing to do,” he said. “Or to pray or meditate to something if things are challenging. Kids don’t have that. The bottom line is having something to fall back on, I think a lot of kids don’t have something to fall back on.”
Members of Crosspoint’s youth ministry said the church has offered an important base of support.