ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: GATHERING IN FAITH BUT NOT TOO CLOSE

• Share

Sunday morning at St. Louis' Kingshighway Baptist Church could pass for a slow day at a retirement-home chapel. The dwindling flock is a sea of white hair and bald heads. And the service, which kicks off with prayers for a colon-cancer victim, is heavy with talk of illness and grandchildren. But as a grandfather of 10 gets up to testify, an unexpectedly joyful noise seeps through the floorboards--the sounds of salsa-inflected guitars and tambourines. The musicians, practicing in a basement fellowship room, belong to a fast-growing young Latino Baptist congregation that has shared Kingshighway's building for the past two years. After the old white folks leave, the Peruvian-born Rev. Amadeo Torres and his Spanish-speaking congregation go upstairs. The pews fill with worshippers from eight countries, including an abundance of fidgety children, and frayed-at-the-edges Kingshighway is transformed into the vibrant Catedral de Dios Iglesia Bautista.

Religious lore is full of men and women whose hearts turn spontaneously toward God--legions of Pauls thrown to the ground by the power of newfound faith. But in the real world, souls have always been won retail, at tent revivals and by door-to-door evangelists. The state of the art in missionary work today is "church planting," the grafting of new congregations--often immigrant or ethnic ones--onto existing churches. No city's religious establishment has pursued church planting more passionately than St. Louis'. But the city's church-planting story carries an ambivalent message: while the outreach brings Christians into the church building, it doesn't quite integrate them into the fold. It is a parable of the worldly limitations that still bedevil communities of faith.

For St. Louis, church planting is that most blessed of arrangements: a win-win proposition. New churches like the French-Speaking Baptist Church of St. Louis, now ensconced inside the ornate walls of the century-old Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, get to worship in some of the most beautiful religious structures in the city instead of the storefronts in which poor congregations often start out. At the same time, church planting has advantages for struggling host congregations like Our Redeemer, whose membership has fallen from 1,200 to 88 as its German-American neighborhood has changed to a black, Haitian and Latino one. With the church scrambling to pay utility bills of as much as $1,000 a month, the $300-a-month rent the Haitians pay comes in handy. And church members say the planted congregation sends a message to the neighborhood. "It helps to see people of all colors coming into the church all week rather than just white people coming in on Sunday," says Our Redeemer president Fred Bodimer III.

Church planting puts Sunday in St. Louis on a busy schedule. At St. Peter's Lutheran, a 35-member white congregation is overshadowed by a planted 150-member Vietnamese Lutheran congregation led by a Vietnamese pastor. Mount Olive Lutheran Church has a white Lutheran service at 10:30 a.m., an African-American Baptist congregation at 12:15 p.m. and an Eritrean Coptic Orthodox congregation at 2 p.m. And Kingshighway Baptist, besides its white and Latino congregations, is host to a special church for street people and unaffiliated youth that meets Thursday nights.