After Kevin McKay finished his internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) in 2006, he stayed on as an administrative assistant.
“Mark Dever heard about my desire to be somewhere that had less access to the Bible,” said McKay, who’d grown up near DC. He was familiar with East Coast liberalism and was thinking about Philadelphia, where less than 8 percent of people were evangelical Christians.
Dever had a different idea.
Kevin McKay / Courtesy of Grace Harbor Church
“We’d have weekenders—pastors coming to observe CHBC for a weekend—come in and we staff would always introduce ourselves,” McKay said. “Mark would point at me and say, ‘Kevin wants to plant a church in Providence, Rhode Island. If anybody knows of anything, let him know.’”
McKay laughs when he tells it: “It wasn’t true! I’d never even been to Providence.”
But when he visited, “it was unlike any other scouting trip [he’d] ever done.” McKay said, “When I’d go to Philadelphia, I’d find stuff was happening there or cropping up that I didn’t know about. In Providence, there really was just not much going on.”
Which is ironic, because Rhode Island is home to the country’s first, second, and third Baptist congregations. By 1762, there were so many Baptists—22,000—that they started a university and named it after the Browns, a prominent Baptist family. Three strains of Baptists—including Calvinist Baptists—have their roots in Rhode Island.
But by 2006, most had moved to mainline Protestantism. In fact, the percent of those attending an evangelical church in the New England states had dropped to between 1 and 3 percent.
One church still preaching the gospel was Grace Harbor Community Church—a pastorless, struggling, three-year-old plant that had convinced Andy Haynes, a campus minister, to preach on Sundays.
Grace Harbor moved into this building in 2012 / Courtesy of Grace Harbor’s Facebook page
Haynes was keeping it going, but it wasn’t much—about 15 or 20 people, mostly Haynes’s college students, meeting in the Courtyard Marriott. They didn’t even have a sign—if you didn’t already know the church was there, you’d never find it.
McKay took the call and started to preach. As he did, the church grew. He started teaching other men in his church to preach. Over the years, he’s trained about 50 preachers.
“We started to have a deep bench,” McKay said. Here’s what you can do with a deep bench: pulpit supply for nearby churches. Here’s what you can do with pulpit supply: expose people to expositional preaching. And here’s what you can do with congregations who love expositional preaching: build a network of healthy churches.
These days, Grace Harbor Church is connected to around 100 area churches that send their pastors to Simeon Trust workshops, weekenders at Grace Harbor, and annual pastor retreats.
“New England is becoming this special place to serve as a pastor,” McKay said. “You can step into what feels like a sweet pastoral fraternity in many ways.”
Preaching Desert
From the beginning, people found Grace Harbor through the church directories of 9Marks or The Gospel Coalition. But mostly, it was by word of mouth.
One early visitor was Lenny Demers, a former Massachusetts Catholic who met Jesus while in the military in 1981. When Demers moved back to New England with his wife in 2004, there were not many gospel-preaching Baptist churches, and finding a place to worship was harder than it should have been.
“You can go all across the Northeast, Providence included, and see steeples everywhere,” McKay said. “But they’re like the Ivy League schools here. Harvard’s motto is ‘For the glory of Christ,’ and by the early 1800s, Adoniram Judson’s father couldn’t send him there because of its theological liberalism.”
Lenny Demers working on securing pews in 2016 / Courtesy of Grace Harbor’s Facebook page
When the Demers family visited a historical Baptist church in central Massachusetts, “it was like an older social club,” Demers said.
“How did you get saved?” Demers asked a deacon.
“What do you mean?” the deacon responded.
After striking out multiple times, “I was so frustrated we basically did church at home, knowing that wasn’t the right way,” Demers said. “But I wasn’t going to have our kids grow up in a church with a warped view of Christianity.”
Through a Bible study he led at UMass medical school, Demers met a medical student named Andrew. After Andrew began doing his residency at Brown University, he called to tell Demers about a church meeting in a hotel.
“We walked into the hotel and my wife said, ‘This is a glorified youth group,’” Demers remembers. “There were about 30 people. I was 48 years old, and I was the third-oldest one there.”
They weren’t skeptical for long.
“I’m sitting there, blown away by this 50-minute message,” Demers said. “I looked at Andrew and said, ‘Do you get this every week?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, yeah.’ I looked at my wife and said, ‘We’re coming here.’ . . . I had been stranded on a desert island, and here was water.”
Others felt the same way. Norm and Cheryl Tremblay cried through their first service. “They said, ‘We’ve been looking for seven years for a church that preaches expositionally,’” McKay remembers.
Training Expository Preachers
McKay and his associate pastor, Travis Rymer, began dumping buckets of expositional preaching into Rhode Island. Rymer had also interned at CHBC, where the night services are often opportunities for men to practice preaching. Grace Harbor began doing that too.
Travis Rymer / Courtesy of Grace Harbor Church
“Anytime I saw a giftedness in communication, I’d ask, ‘Would you like to preach?’” McKay said. He and Rymer walked their recruits through reading the Scripture, prepping the sermon, going over their work, and refining through multiple drafts.
Demers preached on Romans 4 a few weeks ago. “Each time, you have 15 minutes and maybe one to two verses,” he said. “I’ve had six weeks to chew on Romans 4:4–5. I probably put 10 hours into it for a 15-minute message.”
“By the time they get up there, they’re confident they have the main point right and what they’re going to say is faithful,” McKay said. “The next time through, they’re a little more on their own. Now some guys have done it enough that I don’t do it with them.”
Another strategy he and Rymer took from Mark Dever is sermon reviews. They invite a few men and women over on Saturday night to listen to them read through the sermon, then do the same thing Sunday night. They talk through their thought processes, language choices, and order of worship.
“You do that for 15 years, you can’t help but become more effective in ministry,” said Demers, who has “seen Kevin improve so much.”
Grace Habor member Kenny Long preaching from Luke / Courtesy of Grace Harbor’s Facebook page
“Even if you aren’t preaching, you’ll learn from talking about sermons on the front end and the back end,” McKay said. He often invites future elders and anybody thinking about ministry. Over the last 16 years, Grace Harbor—a church of 234 members—has sent 15 men to seminary and taken six through their pastoral internship program.
Today, Grace Harbor has about 20 men who can fill the pulpit on a Sunday night. McKay estimates about 50 men over the years have been given an opportunity to preach.
As those men began speaking in other places, like campus and homeless ministries, the word started to get out: Grace Harbor has extra men who can preach.
That’s when the phone calls started coming in.
Supporting Nearby Churches
One of those calls was from a leader in the mainline American Baptist Church.
“His church lost a pastor under rough circumstances,” McKay said. “He called and said, ‘I heard you have some preaching.’”
The leader was hoping his church could hold on to the gospel. The church was wondering about getting a woman pastor, where it stood on sexual issues, and how it viewed Scripture and theology.
“Our hope was to expose them to expositional preaching,” McKay said. “We ran down, preached, did the music, and met regularly with them to prepare the next pastor for the church.”
Two years later, that church hired a former CHBC intern for their next pastor.
United Baptist Church / Courtesy of United Baptist Church’s Facebook page
“It’s the second-oldest [Baptist] church in America—one that John Clarke planted in 1639,” McKay said. (Clarke was also a Reformed Baptist.) “It’s 350 years old, small and struggling. But it’s preaching the gospel.”
A similar situation happened on Cape Cod.
“When their pastor left after a bad split, some guys reached out and asked for help,” McKay said. “We started meeting with their leadership and doing regular preaching to help fill the pulpit.”
The leadership was split on whether to be nondenominational or Baptist, and the church eventually split too. Grace Harbor helped those who wanted to be Baptist to constitute a church and provided regular preaching until they could hire a pastor.
At the same time, McKay was making as many friends as he could.
“Anytime I heard of anyone preaching the gospel in New England, I’d email,” McKay said. “I’d say, ‘I heard about you from so-and-so. I’d love to get together to hear about your ministry. We’re praying for you down here.’”
After a while, he could spot a pattern.
“New England pastors are mostly in small, underresourced churches,” he said. “Sometimes the pastors have another job. They’re geographically isolated and relationally disconnected. They’re doing everything on their own, so they’re in survival mode.”
McKay and another local pastor began inviting these men to a regular conference call. It wasn’t based around getting to know each other or even sharing prayer requests, although those things happened. Instead, it was focused on expositional preaching.
“We had somebody on the call send out their most recent sermon and we’d all listen to it,” McKay said. “Then we’d get on the call, pray, and give that person feedback on their sermon.”
The next step was naturally to get together in person, and an annual pastors’ retreat was born. “There’s a ton of burnout in New England—we found people weren’t making it past five years, which is not good for churches,” McKay said. “We need pastors who stay, and who are preaching expositionally.”
He began sending out his deep bench of lay preachers to give solo pastors some time off for rest, a vacation, or even sabbaticals.
Grace Harbor congregation / Courtesy of Grace Harbor website
“When pastors have relationships, ministry seems to pop out,” McKay said. He’s seen it: his network of pastors has hosted Simeon Trust workshops, held 9Marks weekenders, and supported church plants.
“The whole landscape is changing,” he said. “It’s amazing.”
These days, Grace Harbor’s 350 weekly attendees can barely squeeze into the small sanctuary they’re renting—in fact, members take turns watching the live stream from the basement fellowship hall. So they’ve bought and are building out an old warehouse factory that, when it’s ready, should seat 600. There’ll be space for more members, parking, Sunday school classrooms, and college ministry.
And there’ll be plenty of room for the formal preaching class McKay is starting this fall, the weekenders, and the workshops. All of them are growing.
“In years past, we were trying to find ways to fill up our Simeon Trust workshop,” McKay said. “This year, it filled up a month in advance and formed a long waiting list.” Grace Harbor’s 9Marks weekender, which was limited by space to 35 attendees, also needed a waiting list without any advertising beyond a single email.
Faithfulness
When McKay first came to New England, he knew it was called the graveyard of ministers, where pastors labored in fruitless obscurity. Back then, he just wanted to be faithful—and to find some friends.
His advice to pastors: Have lunch with the pastor across the street.
“What’s happening here is just the normal ministry of the Word and prayer,” he said. “None of these churches have great big fantastic ministries or platforms. It’s small churches doing things together, and that is changing the landscape of New England.”
Even though it’s what McKay worked and hoped and prayed for, he’s still surprised.
“When I came I didn’t know if the plant would survive,” he said. “I remember thinking, OK, Lord, just bless the preaching of your Word because I don’t know anything else to do.”
“The Lord has done everything,” Rymer said. “We’ve just been able to be part of it.”