Dying church becomes reverse Babel

NEWTON, Mass. — The languages vary from hour to hour, room to room — songs of praise, words of prayer in Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Tagalog.

These worshippers do not share an ethnic heritage, but they do share a faith, and because of that, a building.

The Newton Corner Worship Center is an incubator church, home to small conservative Christian churches that need a place to meet and, they hope, grow.

The building, once home to a dying Baptist congregation, has become a sort of a reverse Tower of Babel over the past two decades, where languages mix, but everyone understands the words are being used to worship the same God.

Still, the churches remain as distinct as the ethnic foods served during social times.

"We find it like brothers living in the same house and we are trying, each of us, to maintain this house," said Sinote Ibrahim, pastor of the Arabic Baptist Church of Boston. "We are in unity together as the body of Christ."

The services are scheduled every few hours on Sunday, with different congregations sometimes upstairs and downstairs simultaneously. The languages and music blended into a clamor on a recent Sunday.

"It is noise, but you know, the noise is good noise," said Dimitrios Deligiannides, an elder in a Greek church that originally bought the building. "Both upstairs and downstairs give thanks to God."

The church, designed by prominent architect Henry Hobson Richardson, broke ground in 1885 and survived as a Baptist church under various names for decades. But after the last Baptist pastor died and the congregation dwindled to about two dozen per Sunday in 1990, the church knew it could not continue.

"The members wanted to sell," said Margaret Ohanian, who belonged to the congregation at the time. "I said, 'Oh no, you're not selling the church.' The Greeks were meeting here two or three years. We gave it to them."

Rebirth at the $2.5 million property, it turned out, cost only a nominal fee of $1 and a promise from the Hellenic Gospel Center that the building would always be a church. Opening the church to other groups was part of the deal from the start, Deligiannides said.

"Because the people helped us, we have the vision to help any small group," he said.

Besides a building, the churches must share a belief in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as well as a portion of the expenses (about $700 each a month).