BANGOR, Maine — Betty Kontio started attending the Rock Church nearly a year ago, when she moved to Hampden from Portland.
“It’s Christ-centered, but it’s not about ritual,” the 52-year-old former Catholic said of the nondenominational church.
It was three years ago when Michael Newman, 40, of Bangor began attending services with the woman who became his wife. He did not attend church before then.
“What keeps me coming back is spiritual endurance,” he said. “Attending services helps me put God’s word into action.”
The church, located on 10½ acres at the corner of Ohio Street and Finson Road in Bangor, completed construction of a 6,000-square foot building with a 411-seat sanctuary in December 2012 at a cost of $613,000. With more than 1,000 worshippers attending three services on Sundays, the congregation is building again.
The project, estimated to cost about $2 million, will include construction of a 10,000 square-foot building with a 600- to 700-seat sanctuary and more than 200 additional parking spaces. The parking areas and foundation for the new building are scheduled to be completed this fall with the new building ready for services in December 2017.
The Bangor Planning Board earlier this month approved the plan.
Robert Perry of Hermon, a church member, will oversee construction of the new building as he did when the current building went up in 2012.
“I think a lot more church members would be there a lot more regularly if there was ample parking and room to get in,” Perry said last week. “If you are late to the 10 a.m service, you are not going to get a parking space or a seat.”
The Rock Church’s rapid growth in Bangor appears to be unprecedented in the Bangor area over the past 50 years. The congregation in 2005 purchased its present location, a former Pentecostal church. Within a year, Pastor Kirk Winters, 48, of Glenburn was conducting two services on Sunday in the original 170-seat sanctuary, which now is used for the church’s children’s programs.
Once the new church is constructed, the current building will house the church’s children and teen programs. How the original church building will be utilized has not been determined.
National surveys over the past decade have consistently shown that Maine is one of the least religious states in the nation. The share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still high compared with other advanced industrial countries, slipped to 89 percent in 2014 from 92 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study, released last year.
In that study, 47 percent of Mainers said they seldom or never attended religious services. Just 22 percent said they attended services at least once a week. Of the 60 percent who listed Christian as their religious preference, 21 percent identified themselves as Catholics, 21 percent said they belonged to a mainline Protestant denomination and 14 percent said they were evangelicals, the category into which the Rock Church falls.
Kontio and Newman — one left a mainline denomination and the other had no religious background — are typical of the worshippers keeping evangelical churches around the country from losing members at as fast a pace as other Christian denominations are, according to the Pew study. Between 2007 and 2014, evangelicals lost less than 1 percent of their share of the population. Mainline Protestants lost nearly 3.5 percent of their populations while Catholics lost about 3 percent of theirs.
“The real reason for our growth is that God blesses us,” Winters said earlier this month. “We also have a welcoming environment and preach the truth of God’s word in a loving way. You mix truth with love, and that’s a winning combination.”
Winters, who graduated in 1986 from Brewer High School, grew up attending Glad Tidings Church in Bangor. Four years later, he graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in business administration.
He left the secular world after a few years at Bath Iron Works to attend Bible college. Winters graduated in the mid-1990s from Rhema Bible Training Center in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. After a stint at a church in Jacksonville, Florida, Winters felt called to return to Maine to start a nondenominational church.
In May 1998, the minister and his wife, Lisa Winters, moved back to Maine and rented a house in Portland, where they conducted Bible study classes with six adults and eight children. Six years later, Winters had baptized 100 people, the congregation had grown to nearly 200, had a permanent home in South Portland and was debt free. It too is expanding next year, according to Winters.
Winters moved to Bangor in 2005, when the church he grew up in and another evangelical church in Bangor, Abundant Life, were experiencing difficulties. That combined with the minister’s roots in the community and his laid-back preaching style allowed the Rock Church to take root.
In addition to the Bangor and South Portland locations, Rock Church congregations are worshipping in Orono and Sullivan, which each draw about 90 worshippers per Sunday.
Like many churches seeking to attract young families, the Rock Church’s Bangor building has a coffee bar, sophisticated sound and video system, web streaming and podcasts of services, small group Bible study and a program for children and teens. In addition to its religious program, the Rock Church has a food pantry that serves 70 to 80 families on Saturdays. It also works with the Eastern Maine Area Agency on Aging to distribute commodities to seniors once per month. Penquis Cap also uses the facility for a play date program for parents and young children.
Joe Sites, 66, of Bangor is very involved in those programs and in managing the facility. He has been attending the church for nine years.
“I’m pleasing the Lord,” Sites said when asked why he devotes so much time to the church. “I’d just as soon sleep in Saturdays, but God — he gets me up.”
Winters expects that after the new building is completed, 2,000 worshippers will be able to worship at the Rock Church if they listen to God’s call on Sunday mornings.