In nation’s top mission field, creating better fellowship (reporting from Taunton, Mass.): The New England Lectureship brings together Christians in the state with the lowest ratio of members of Churches of Christ.
TAUNTON, Mass. — As Maurice Davis points out, Massachusetts — one of the nation’s least religious states — is a mission field.
In fact, none of the 50 states has a lower ratio of members of Churches of Christ than this one, a Christian Chronicle analysis found.
The state’s 28 churches and roughly 2,300 men, women and children in the pews represent a tiny fraction of Massachusetts’ 6.6 million total residents.
“The congregations are isolated, independent,” said Davis, who moved here four years ago after serving Texas and Oklahoma churches for two decades, “and everybody is more focused on their own ministry at their location than seeing the benefit of us all working together and seeing the greater good we could accomplish.”
Aiming to create better fellowship and relationships among the region’s Churches of Christ, Davis helped revive the New England Lectureship, a once-annual event that had disappeared.
Related coverage: America’s top mission fields: a computer-assisted analysis of all 50 states
This story appears in the July 2014 print edition of The Christian Chronicle.
The Ross News 