BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
James C. Smith moves plants at Lakota High School after a Heartland Church service.
(Steve Shaffer photo)
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As some of their city colleagues grapple with church closings and dwindling congregations, pastors near the Interstate 275 beltway and beyond are facing the opposite problem: how to attract and minister to the thousands of new residents in their neighborhoods.
Explosive growth in the counties encircling Cincinnati is bringing more than traffic headaches, strip malls and endless new subdivisions. The Eastgate area, Boone County and especially the West Chester and Mason areas are also experiencing a boom in religious institutions, with newly formed churches meeting in public schools and others building around their bursting seams.
Keeping up
Like subdivision developers who pick the right cornfield to build on, many churches are growing simply because they are in the right place at the right time. Others are taking advantage of new sites and new congregants to try ministering in new ways to the late-20th-century faithful.
"If you're doing at least some things right, with people moving into the area you're going to grow," said the Rev. Mark Murphy of the Fellowship of Believers in Florence.
"Some (churches) are growing just because of growth in the area. And then there are some that are growing fast because of growth in the area and because they are a relevant church, meeting the needs of people."
Members of growing churches cite relevancy, along with worship style and children's programs, as key reasons to join. Greg and Melissa Chandler, who married and moved to Batavia last year, attend Mount Carmel Church of Christ, which is preparing to add to its Cherry Grove structure. The church has grown from 150 to more than 1,000 members since 1983.
"Growing up as a kid, church was never my thing -- the service was boring and the music was boring," said Mrs. Chandler, 25, a high school teacher. "And the preaching -- it's based on the Bible, but Gary (the Rev. Gary Morris) connects it to your life."
Scott and Leslie Kessling, who moved to Anderson Township last year, also attend Mount Carmel. As they picked up their children after a recent Sunday morning service, they hit the same notes as the Chandlers, with one addition.
Fellowship Believers Church in Florence is expanding. Work should be completed in September.
(Steven M. Herppich photo)
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"One of the main things is the children's programs. We have five kids, so it's important to us," Mr. Kessling, 33, said.
"It's also fun," Mrs. Kessling said. "It's an enjoyable service to come and listen to, and you get a lot out of it."
Mostly Christian
The building boom, about a decade old, cuts across denominational and even faith lines, with the Jain Center of Cincinnati and Dayton and the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati both new to West Chester. But the overwhelming number of institutions are Christian churches, and they tell remarkably similar tales:
The Fellowship of Believers is building a $2 million multipurpose building along Interstate 75, due for completion in September. Leaders are already thinking about their next construction project and the need to purchase more land.
Vineyard Fellowship in Springdale recently broke ground on a $13 million, 103,000-square-foot facility in Tri-County. The church expects to move into its new digs in the fall of 1999, after outgrowing its current building in less than a decade.
St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church of West Chester was founded in 1989 to help serve the families at the rapidly growing St. John parish nearby. St. Maximilian started with 500 families and is now up to 1,700 families who attend four weekly services. St. John, meanwhile, recently broke ground on a $4 million new church that will double its capacity from 624 to 1,200.
Mount Carmel Church of Christ built its current sanctuary in 1988 and is about to add a fourth service, in addition to holding a youth service off-site. The new addition, estimated at $250,000 to $750,000, will likely be only temporary; the church expects to buy land and build to the east within five years.
The Mason Church of Christ, with 1,200 members on the rolls, is hoping to build soon on a 1,000-acre farm it purchased on Mason-Montgomery Road. The church has held activities such as Bible study and day care at as many as five sites on Sunday mornings because of a lack of space.
Union Presbyterian Church in Union, Ky., built a 12,000-square-foot addition in 1994 for about $750,000, but is already starting to feel a space crunch. The church has gone from about 60 worshipers a week to 200 and is starting a second service in the fall.
Other brand-new churches, such as Heartland Community Church in West Chester, are meeting in schools while they establish themselves and gain a following. For every church moving out of a school and into a new building -- such as New Life Community Church in Anderson Township, which moved from Anderson High School to a converted bowling alley two years ago -- there is another church usually waiting to take its place in the schools.
The growth of religious institutions reflects population growth as measured by recent U.S. Census figures. Warren County remains the second-fastest growing county in Ohio, growing by 23 percent from 113,927 people in 1990 to an estimated 140,080 in 1997. In the same period Butler County grew 12.1 percent, from 291,479 to 326,749.
Boone County had the fastest rate of growth in the Tristate, with a 32.3 percent increase. An estimated 76,173 people lived there in 1997, compared with 57,589 in 1990. Clermont County's population jumped by more than 15 percent for the same period, from 150,167 to about 173,000.
The churches, with their similar tales of expansion, find similarities in their ministries as well. Nearly all serve young families with children, so youth programs have become a priority. Some are opening day-care centers in the hope that clients will eventually become members of the church.
Hope Evangelical Free Church in Mason, which has 900 enrolled in its youth groups, opened an 8,000-square-foot youth activity building in September. The building, nicknamed The City, contains a full-service coffee bar, old-fashioned malt shop, jukebox, hallways lined with sports memorabilia, a game room with a 60-inch television, table tennis and pool tables and other attractions. The church sends young people to do volunteer work in Over-the-Rhine and in Mexican orphanages.
The building and programs reflect the church's commitment to teens, as does the fact that the youth pastor was the second person hired when the church opened 8 1/2 years ago. That commitment often attracts people new to the area, who in many cases are most concerned with programs for their children.
"When they walk in, one of the first things they ask is, where are your children's ministries, where are your youth ministries?" said the Rev. Jeff Greer, Hope's youth pastor. "If you don't have a strong youth program, you're limiting your ability to minister to a community. There's no doubt about it."
Congregational leaders are also sensitive to the fact that, once people reach adulthood, their needs continue to change. Much of the current church growth was fueled by baby boomers, while increasing numbers of new residents are members of Generation X, with different spiritual needs and worship styles. Mount Carmel Church of Christ is adding a Gen-X service next year, likely on Saturday nights, with different music and a different attitude.
"Anything you do for too long starts to get stale," said Mount Carmel's Pastor Morris. "I think boomers are more introspective. The Gospel messages focused on the how-to, on day-to-day issues. I think Generation X wants that too, but they want things to be genuine. They want things to be real and down to earth and not glossed over." Churches in the I-275 beltway, like new churches nationwide, also find residents are less interested in denominational affiliation and more interested in matching worship style and values. At St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, the Rev. Thomas Wray estimates fully half the members were not raised Episcopalian. On the sign at Anderson Hills United Methodist Church, the words "United Methodist" are below the church's name, in smaller print.
An abundance of people is certainly a happy problem, but challenges accompany the growth. Those challenges are different but no less daunting than those faced by downtown pastors.
Congregations in the newer communities are more transient; many families work long hours and don't have much time for church activity, and many of the churches lack any sort of organized cooperation -- the Lakota Ministerial Association, for instance, folded recently for a lack of interest.
Some pastors worry that the spurt of growth has made it difficult to distinguish among churches, because many use the same tools of contemporary worship: small groups, drama and conscious informality. The Rev. Carl Franco is senior pastor of Wellspring Community Church in West Chester, which began in 1992 and is hoping to build on 20 acres just off Interstate 75. He compares his church, with an attendance of 225, to Crossroads Community Church in Hyde Park, which began four years after Wellspring but has surpassed it in size.
"I think a lot of people perceive this area as a great place to start a church," said the Rev. Mr. Franco, who started the church by selling his house and going without a salary for a year. "But up here a new church doing contemporary methodology is not news. In Hyde Park a new church doing new methodology is groundbreaking. We're not looked at as cutting-edge."
Still others worry that the boom has created a non-Christian emphasis on numbers and growth and building, rather than on the lessons of the Gospel. The Rev. Harold Graves of West Chester Church of the Nazarene is concerned that the 50-strong church which nurtures and instructs its members is overlooked in the stampede to boast the largest Sunday attendance.
"It concerns me that so much emphasis is placed in our culture on judging the success of churches by Wall Street standards," he said. "I don't know where we get this idea that success is anything more than faithfulness."
