Come One, Come All.(megachurches)(Brief biography)

At the turnoff to the New Milford town green, Route 7, the two-lane road that winds through the narrow, forested valley of the Housatonic River, linking rural northwestern Connecticut with Danbury and the suburbanized south, abruptly opens out into four lanes. A few miles farther south, the road is still under construction, but already auto dealerships and mini-malls have sprung up on both sides, leaving only an empty farm stand and a quilting shop to remind passersby that New Milford was once a farming community. Faith Church, completed two years ago, is hard to see for the roadwork, and hard to identify, because, apart from the three stucco crosses on its facade, the building looks much like a big-box store. The church parking lot is enormous, and at 10:45 A.M. on a Sunday hundreds of people stream from their cars to the wide glass doors of the church for the second service of the morning.

In New Milford, a town of thirty thousand, Faith Church is a matter of curiosity. It looks nothing like the Congregational and Episcopal churches on the historic green, or even the modern Catholic and Baptist churches in town. People call it "the faith place," and they wonder who goes there and where they come from.

Faith Church, however, would look familiar to people in other parts of the country. The doors open onto a spacious and well-lit reception area with wall-to-wall carpeting, plasma TV screens, and sofas, where people can watch the service going on in the sanctuary. The first time I attended services there, an ebullient woman in bluejeans introduced herself as Susan and invited me over to the booth to pick up some information about the church. While I leafed through four-color brochures advertising Bible-study classes, a day-care center, a pre-K-12 school, and a variety of ministries, she asked if I wanted to fill out a card with my contact information and gave me a gift for newcomers--a beribboned package containing a coupon for the church's coffee shop, more brochures, and a CD of a sermon by the senior pastor, Frank Santora, on how to build self-esteem by "seeing yourself as God sees you." Did I want information about small groups? There were groups for single women, basketball players, scrapbook-makers, museumgoers, and a group led by Susan herself for people learning to trade on eBay.

I passed a bookstore and found myself in a hallway decorated with comic-book-style murals of a street scene in an old-fashioned town. At a registration desk, parents were lining up at a computerized check-in system to get name tags for their kids before sending them in to the schoolrooms for children's church, which offers Bible lessons, worship, playtime, and snacks. At the "Sonbucks" coffee shop down the hall, volunteers were working an espresso machine. When a band began to play, people drifted into the sanctuary, some carrying their Styrofoam cups with them.

The sanctuary at Faith Church, as in many megachurches, looks like a modern concert hall, with more than a thousand comfortable seats arrayed in front of a deep stage. The services often begin with soft rock music, played by an eight-piece band, then singers appear, to lead the congregation in praise songs: "I worship you" and "Wonderful God, you are worthy." The worship pastor, Charles Reid, an African-American, directs this part of the service from a keyboard, interpolating the music with prayers. All the other full-time pastors on the staff are white, but the congregation is about forty per cent white and thirty per cent African-American, with the rest predominantly Latino and Asian. The doctrinal statement on the church Web site makes it clear that the church is Pentecostal, but Faith Church is nondenominational, and, while in most Pentecostal churches the worship is spontaneous and ecstatic, with people raising their arms in rapture and sometimes speaking in tongues, here the worship is decorous. The services, which usually include live skits or videos that introduce the text of the sermon, are well produced--almost professionally so--by a woman on the church staff. The lyrics of the songs and the Biblical verses the pastors cite appear simultaneously on a large video screen above the stage, and television cameras record the services for broadcast on a dozen local public-access stations.

On the stage, Frank Santora was preaching the second sermon of a series called "God's Apprentice," before a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline. With an untucked, open-necked shirt, he looked like any man from the audience. He sat at a small table at the front of the stage, wearing a head mike, and spoke in a conversational manner. His sermon was on how to influence people, and in explaining how not to do it he gave a funny imitation, in his high tenor voice, of a guy on a soapbox telling everyone they were going to Hell. When he told Bible stories, he used everyday language and created lively, sometimes comic dramas. In Santora's version of the story of Mary and Martha, Jesus shows up at their house for lunch unannounced with twelve hungry fishermen. The floors aren't washed, the living room isn't vacuumed, and the dishes are still in the sink. Martha, "in panic mode," busies herself cleaning, cooking, and setting the table. She's so busy she doesn't have time for Jesus. Mary, meanwhile, "has got this thing figured out." Their house, she thinks, is what it is, and Jesus didn't come to be impressed. So she just clears a space on the floor ...