In the news: As printed in The New York Times
June 29, 2003

By George James

ROCKAWAY
It was once home to a technology company, a sprawling one-and-two-story building in a boxy utilitarian style that could be called industrial modern, a beige stone and concrete "L" on 107 acres of land. Hardly the place one would envision for a church.
But that is exactly what officials of Christ Church, an evangelical Protestant congregation, have in mind for the former Agilent Technologies site that the church is buying in this large semirural township for more than $14 million. So far, the plan seems to have drawn little notice here. "We need the space," said the Rev. David Ireland, 41, the founder and senior pastor of the church. Its current building in Montclair, a 900-seat Romanesque structure with Tiffany windows, which once served a Baptist congregation, is insufficient for the 5,000 members who worship there each week, he said.
"We've outgrown the cathedral for a number of years now," Pastor Ireland said. "We want a campus setting so we can be able to serve the community and also our congregation in a much more complete way, from athletics to a community center to our Community Development Corporation to having fewer worship services, having more people sitting at one time together." Christ Church made its offer in March for the rolling grass campus of Agilent Technologies, a spin-off of Hewlett-Packard that closed operations here last October.
The sale is expected to be final in late summer, and Dr. Ireland hopes to go before the township planning board in September for a zoning variance to allow Christ Church to renovate a little more than half of the 283,000-square-foot-building and demolish the rest to make way for a 3,000-seat sanctuary. That would allow the congregation to come together in two services each Sunday instead of the five now offered in Montclair. Renovation and construction would cost about $17 million, he said.
Christ Church finds itself in step with other rapidly growing congregations known as megachurches that need space to expand. They are buying unlikely places like large food stores, shopping centers, armories and, in the case of Faithful Central Bible Church in Los Angeles, the former Great Western Forum where the Lakers and the Kings basketball teams played until 1999. As defined by John N. Vaughan, a researcher, megachurches, which are largely conservative Protestant, are as those that attract at least 2,000 worshipers a week. In New Jersey, one such church, Faith Fellowship Ministries World Outreach Center, a charismatic congregation of 3,600 families, began moving from Edison in 1996 and built a 2,900-seat sanctuary on a 14-acre site in Sayreville that was once used by Public Service Electric and Gas Company as a training center.
At least 700 megachurches in the United States share common characteristics with Christ Church and they have almost three million members, said Dr. Vaughan, founder and director of Church Growth Today, an independent research center in Bolivar, Mo.
In a report issued in 2000, Dr. Vaughan said New Jersey ranked 31st in the number of people who attend megachurches. But the number has probably soared since then, he said recently, citing expanding congregations in such megachurches as Hawthorne Gospel Church in Passaic County, Faith Fellowship Ministries in Sayreville and Bethany Baptist Church in Lindenwold near Philadelphia.
Bethany Baptist, a Pentecostal church with 13,500 members that is increasing by 4,000 members a year, is probably the largest megachurch in New Jersey, Dr. Vaughan said. "One reason why churches are building on large existing properties is parking," Dr. Vaughan said. "It's less expensive. You have ready-made parking, and you have room to expand. You're able to expand without having a major impact on neighboring properties." Scott Thumma, a sociologist who is a faculty associate at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, says most megachurches are in California, Texas, Florida and Georgia. Only 6 percent are in the Northeast. In a study two years ago, Dr. Thumma reported that the most rapid growth came in the last 20 years, primarily in suburbs around cities of 250,000 or more.
His study also showed that the growth of megachurches was driven by the charisma of highly visible senior pastors, 88 percent of whom are white and 6 percent are African-American like Dr. Ireland. Christ Church, established by Pastor Ireland with seven other people in an Irvington catering hall in 1986, had 500 members when it bought the First Baptist Church in Montclair for a reported $1.2 million in 1994. First Baptist Church was built in 1911 during the leadership of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal clergyman who later became nationally known as pastor of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Gustav Niebuhr, writing for The New York Times at the time of the sale, said the transaction between First Baptist as the old mainstream congregation and the evangelical Christ Church was "emblematic of a major shift in American Protestantism." Over three decades, he said, liberal and moderate mainline Protestant denominations like the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had lost members while evangelical churches had flourished. Many churches have radio and television ministries. During his sermons, Dr. Ireland's image is projected on large TV monitors and the sermon is recorded for later broadcast on radio and television to an estimated 50 million households in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and California.
He is a charismatic speaker, and the appeal of his sermons, he believes, is that they focus on the Bible not only as spiritual resource but as practical guide for everyday life, with themes such as "How Can I Be Happy?" and "How to Affair-Proof Your Marriage." He also has written five books, including two that the church published under its Impact Publishing House imprint: "What Color Is Your God? A New Approach to Developing a Multicultural Lifestyle" and "Failure Is Written in
Pencil: How to Turn Your Failures Into Success."
Like most megachurches, Christ Church has a large paid staff and army of volunteers to administer some 50 church and social outreach programs. It employs nine ministers, four of them full time, and 50 full-time employees and can count on 400 to 500 volunteers, Dr. Ireland said. The programs include youth education, a legal and medical clinic, a financial planning course, a drug and alcohol recovery program, a counseling unit and marriage- and family-enrichment programs. The move by Christ Church to the former Agilent complex here represents a kind of full-circle spiritual journey for Dr. Ireland. A former consulting engineer and self-described "scientific atheist," he became a believer and now finds himself bringing religion into a place that once symbolized science and technology. "I was a modern-day Paul before my conversion," Pastor Ireland said. He grew up in Rosedale, Queens. His father was an accountant and his mother an education consultant in early childhood development. He went to a Methodist Church until he turned 13 and his parents no longer made him go.
After attending Brooklyn Tech, the elite high school in New York, he received a partial athletic scholarship to play baseball at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. He won a full academic scholarship to Stevens Institute of Technology and received his master's in civil engineering.
"I used to terrorize the Christians on the campus, bringing up philosophical arguments in debate," he said of his time at Fairleigh. "I did it to justify my own atheist position, but all along I was searching." One night after receiving his undergraduate degree and while sitting on his bed in his dorm on the Teaneck campus, feeling forlorn and empty, he asked God if he was there and, if so, to give him faith. In that instant, he recalls, "I became born again." The time and date - 10 p.m. July 6, 1982 - are lodged in his memory. He began attending church again. As he got more involved with church activities during his years as a consulting engineer for a number of New Jersey engineering companies, he began to think he would be happier as a minister. He began studies at the church he was attending, the New Ark Evangelistic Revival Church in East Orange, and was ordained and licensed in 1983. He later got a master's of divinity degree from Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack and a Ph.D. in organizational leadership with a minor in divinity from Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va.
In June 1986, at the age of 24, he and his wife, Marlinda, invited six friends to a catering hall in Irvington and asked them to help start a church. It became known as the Tabernacle of Love Christian Center, and over the next eight years it held services at the Holiday Inn in Springfield, in the multipurpose room of St. Andrew and Holy Communion Episcopal Church in South Orange and at catering halls in Union and Bloomfield. When it move to Montclair, it took the name Christ Church. The current congregation represents 25 nations and is 80 percent black and 20 percent white, Asian or other. Members travel from Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Union and Warren Counties and New York City and Rockland County in New York. Dr. Thumma said in a telephone interview that megachurches represent less than 1 percent of the 350,000 congregations in the country. "But," he added, "their importance in society and the formative shaping of what religion is in the country is astronomical compared to their size." Indeed, aside from providing Bible-focused services accompanied by large electronically amplified orchestras and choirs performing everything from hymns to country music, many megachurches offer secular facets like health clubs and, in one Houston church, a McDonald's restaurant, to draw people into the church environment.
The proposed Christ Church campus on Green Pond Road here would house administrative offices, an elementary school, a gymnasium and fitness center, a banquet hall, a small religious museum, a gift shop, a school of performing arts, a computer learning center, a center for adult leadership development courses and a community development corporation that is using a $120,000 grant from President Bush's faith initiative program for a program to help teenagers be sexually abstinent.
The new sanctuary would feature stadium seating, and the gym and fitness center, baseball and soccer fields, basketball and tennis courts would be open to the community, Dr. Ireland said.
He said he thought few of the nearly 23,000 people in this 45-square-mile township were aware of the church's purchase of the property or its plan to seek approval of a change in use. But he said he had met with the mayor, Louis S. Sceusi, and found him to be "very positive."
Mayor Sceusi seemed less committal in a telephone interview. He confirmed that he had met with Pastor Ireland but was concerned about losing the tax revenue that a commercial or industrial company, like Agilent, formerly one of the town's largest employers with 1,000 workers, would pay for use of the site. "We have a small mix of light industry, and Agilent was one of the bigger companies, almost 2 percent of the tax revenue," Mayor Sceusi said. "As I said to Reverend Ireland, I am concerned with the fact we're going to lose a large tax payment. I would prefer it to be commercial and not put a burden on the taxpayers." For his part, Dr. Ireland says the loss in taxes would be offset by money spent by members of the congregation. "We did an economic impact study, and we showed we will be able to provide $6 million a year into the community based on our parishioners frequenting their various enterprises from stores to restaurants to using various vendors in the community," he said. "That's $6 million a year to offset $700,00 in ratables." The mayor is also concerned about increased traffic on Green Pond Road. But Dr. Ireland says the two Sunday services, with an hour in between, would have minimal effect on traffic. The largest municipality in Morris County, Rockaway Township is home to Rockaway Townsquare, a shopping mall with more than 200 stores, and to Picatinny Arsenal, a weapons testing center near Dover that has been making munitions since 1879. The township has another evangelical church, the Green Pond Bible Chapel, in addition to a Jewish temple, a Lubavitcher learning center, two Catholic churches and Presbyterian, Lutheran and Methodist congregations. The mayor said members of Christ Church would probably have no problem fitting into the largely white, middle-income Rockaway, which he called "a town with a lot of character" and history.
Nonetheless, some New Jersey churches in the past have had trouble getting variances when moving to a new town. Faith Fellowship Ministries was one of them. The Sayreville zoning board turned down its application, in part because it said the presence of a church would discourage businesses from moving to the site where the church wanted to build. A Superior Court judge in New Brunswick reversed the decision, saying the ruling was unreasonable. Pastor Ireland is optimistic that things will go smoothly here. "We're not asking for any setbacks," he said. "We're not asking for any lessening of parking requirements, we're not asking for height changes. Nothing." He added, "We're just simply saying we want to convert this use into a church and we think it's going to be better for the community, rather than having a research building that looks very industrial in its facade."