Walking down Kilmarnock Street in the Fenway on Saturday night, Rebecca Nelson chuckled when she heard music and people spilling out of Church.
“This place was nuts last night,” Nelson, 25, said of the rock club yesterday morning. “It’s so different during Sundays.”
Nelson then greeted Pastor David W. Hall’s family as they bounded through the door of the barroom that smelled more like Lysol than stale beer.
On Sunday mornings, Church is literally a church for Newfrontiers, a worldwide family of churches together on a mission in more than 60 nations.
“A lot of people accused Jesus of being sacrilegious, hanging out with people who were drunks and prostitutes,” said Hall, 28, of Fenway Church. “We get that label for trying to be where people that need God are. We’re not really worried about it. We’re not getting drunk at church. The bar is closed. We’re just meeting people where they are at.”
Featuring live Christian rock, the weekly service started with 25 people two years ago and can attract as many as 90.
“It’s an area where there’s not a lot of churches,” Hall said. “Probably only 2 to 3 percent of the people are involved in a church [in the Fenway] and so we saw this [area] as a place to start a new church to meet the needs of the neighborhood and give them an experience of church and Jesus that they haven’t had before.”
