City school to serve as ‘worship facility’
Mass.-based church to open doors Oct. 1
By RUSS OLIVO
WOONSOCKET — A fast-growing, non-denominational church based in Massachusetts will launch a new worship site on Oct. 1 in Woonsocket Middle School at Hamlet – space it’s renting from the Woonsocket Education Department.
Waters Church has about 3,000 members at its existing locations in Norwood and North Attleboro, according to Executive Pastor Shane Parsons.
He says the middle school is one of two new worship facilities that will open on the first Sunday in October. Another will be launched in Milford, also in a public school – the Stacy Middle School.
“We’re going to reach out to new members in the
Woonsocket area,” said Parsons. “We’re growing fast and we’re excited to be part of the Woonsocket community.”
Logistically, a service at the middle school will be significantly unlike the experience that most area churchgoers are accustomed to. While there will be a “campus pastor” present at the middle school to interact with members, about half of the roughly 75-minute worship session will feature a sermon piped in electronically and displayed on a large screen. The service will be livestreamed from Waters Church’s facility in North Attleboro, where it will be delivered live to another branch of the flock by Lead Pastor Tim Hatch.
Each service will also feature live Christian music and accommodations for “Waters Kids” – specific areas where children are exposed to ageappropriate teachings about Jesus and other religious topics.
If it seems unique, well, that may be the whole point. Waters Church’s foremost mission is to reach out to a group of people Parsons calls “the unchurched” – people who don’t go to church.
“For one reason or another they don’t go to church,” says Parsons. “We're coming into the community to offer something a little different. We might attract people other churches won’t attract.”
Pastor Hatch has some ideas about why people don’t go to church.
“It’s boring,” he asserts in his blog, which is available on the Waters Church website. “Going to church every week and leaving is a real snooze-fest if you ask me.”
But Hatch goes on to say that the answer to the ho-hum experience of church is, well, church. The key is making religious worship a dynamic, activity-based experience.
“Our church’s desire is to benefit the community of Woonsocket,” Hatch said later in a phone interview. “We’re not there to impose our views on anybody. We’re there to be a blessing to the community. There’s no reason to go there if we’re not going to help people.”
While Hatch will preach from a former factory building previously occupied by the L.G. Balfour Company in North Attleboro, Woonsocket Campus Pastor Jim Shekleton and his wife Neldys will be on hand at the middle school to minister to the congregation.
Woonsocket Education Department Facilities Director Peter Fontaine said Waters Church first approached the School Committee about a year ago and eventually the parties reached an agreement to rent the gym and cafeteria on Sundays for its worship services. “It’s not a lease,” he said, but a rental agreement under the same terms that the WED would charge for any other suitor, secular or religious.
Fontaine, however, said he sought an opinion from the School Committee’s legal counsel Sara Rapport to make sure such an arrangement would not run afoul of the constitutional separation of church and state. The rental agreement was approved after it was cleared by Rapport.
“It’s okay,” she said, adding the U.S. Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that public school facilities must treat all organizations, religious or otherwise, exactly alike. “Whatever we do for the Girl Scouts, for example, we have to afford equivalent accommodations subject to the same terms and conditions.”
Fontaine said Waters Church is paying the standard rate the School Committee would charge to any organization seeking to use the facilities – $40 per hour for the gymnasium, plus $40 per hour for the cafeteria. The church must also pay for a custodian, which varies according to pay grade, but the cost averages $35 an hour.
The agreement is locked in only for the duration of the academic year, but it is renewable in June if Waters Church wants to continue holding services at the middle school.