ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

By ADAM COHEN

Sunday morning at St. Louis' Kingshighway Baptist Church could pass for a slow day at a retirement-home chapel. The dwindling flock is a sea of white hair and bald heads. And the service, which kicks off with prayers for a colon-cancer victim, is heavy with talk of illness and grandchildren. But as a grandfather of 10 gets up to testify, an unexpectedly joyful noise seeps through the floorboards--the sounds of salsa-inflected guitars and tambourines. The musicians, practicing in a basement fellowship room, belong to a fast-growing young Latino Baptist congregation that has shared Kingshighway's building for the past two years. After the old white folks leave, the Peruvian-born Rev. Amadeo Torres and his Spanish-speaking congregation go upstairs. The pews fill with worshippers from eight countries, including an abundance of fidgety children, and frayed-at-the-edges Kingshighway is transformed into the vibrant Catedral de Dios Iglesia Bautista.

Religious lore is full of men and women whose hearts turn spontaneously toward God--legions of Pauls thrown to the ground by the power of newfound faith. But in the real world, souls have always been won retail, at tent revivals and by door-to-door evangelists. The state of the art in missionary work today is "church planting," the grafting of new congregations--often immigrant or ethnic ones--onto existing churches. No city's religious establishment has pursued church planting more passionately than St. Louis'. But the city's church-planting story carries an ambivalent message: while the outreach brings Christians into the church building, it doesn't quite integrate them into the fold. It is a parable of the worldly limitations that still bedevil communities of faith.

For St. Louis, church planting is that most blessed of arrangements: a win-win proposition. New churches like the French-Speaking Baptist Church of St. Louis, now ensconced inside the ornate walls of the century-old Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer, get to worship in some of the most beautiful religious structures in the city instead of the storefronts in which poor congregations often start out. At the same time, church planting has advantages for struggling host congregations like Our Redeemer, whose membership has fallen from 1,200 to 88 as its German-American neighborhood has changed to a black, Haitian and Latino one. With the church scrambling to pay utility bills of as much as $1,000 a month, the $300-a-month rent the Haitians pay comes in handy. And church members say the planted congregation sends a message to the neighborhood. "It helps to see people of all colors coming into the church all week rather than just white people coming in on Sunday," says Our Redeemer president Fred Bodimer III.

Church planting puts Sunday in St. Louis on a busy schedule. At St. Peter's Lutheran, a 35-member white congregation is overshadowed by a planted 150-member Vietnamese Lutheran congregation led by a Vietnamese pastor. Mount Olive Lutheran Church has a white Lutheran service at 10:30 a.m., an African-American Baptist congregation at 12:15 p.m. and an Eritrean Coptic Orthodox congregation at 2 p.m. And Kingshighway Baptist, besides its white and Latino congregations, is host to a special church for street people and unaffiliated youth that meets Thursday nights.

Relations between planted and host churches are often not as warm as either side would like. "The interaction is not really close," says Frantz Sanon, pastor of the Haitian congregation. "We always seem to meet in a rush." This is partly by design--a half-hour gap between the two services cuts down on chance encounters in the chapel, which nobody really seems to want. Language can also be a barrier. "My congregation can't understand him even when he speaks English," jokes the Rev. William Doubek of his Vietnamese counterpart. Moreover, different denominations cannot worship together. "If we were to hold a joint service, the Lutheran Synod would be pretty hard on us," Bodimer notes. And, says Our Redeemer treasurer Charles Wuensch, "there is a feeling among some in the congregation that we don't have anything in common with these people, that we wouldn't have anything to say to them."

At least some of the distance is racial. Bruce Sikes, pastor of the Messiah Youth Ministry, says that at one church, a deacon came right out and objected that Sikes' street-oriented mission was bringing blacks into the church. And at Mount Olive, a white parishioner would not let a group from the black congregation in to practice a Kwanza ceremony. But Mount Olive has since started a race-relations workshop involving both the white Lutheran and black Baptist congregations--a sign, most St. Louisans involved in church planting contend, that this kind of roof sharing can be a force for racial cooperation. "The first black baptized here I baptized six or seven years ago, and some of the people literally went into shock," says Paul Powell, retired pastor of Kingshighway Baptist Church. "It took some doing, but these old southside German Baptists are now in the racial forefront."

The biggest obstacle is cultural differences built into worship styles. Speaking of black Baptists who share his church, Lutheran Doubek says, "When they sing Amazing Grace, the song is the same but it sounds different." Our Redeemer's Haitians use Haitian music, and the Kingshighway Latino congregation integrates salsa, soul and tango sounds. Sermon styles differ: African Americans expect call and response from the pews and services that last twice as long as a typical white service. Roosevelt Clossum, minister of the African-American congregation at Mount Olive, says that when he went to give a guest sermon before the whites at Kingshighway, he was warned that if he preached more than an hour, a trapdoor would open under him.

One reason for separate congregations is that they make saving souls easier. A doctrine called the "homogeneous unit principle" says churches "grow faster when you have people of a like culture worshipping together," notes Thom Rainer, a dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. Explains Van Kicklighter, a church-planting strategist: "Our overriding concern is reaching an unreached group of people and planting witnesses among them. Our purpose is not necessarily to be multiethnic." That's also true for many immigrant and African-American ministers. "God doesn't want us to separate out," says Sanon, "but for some reason, it is in humans to want to stay with their own kind."