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Who We Are
The Chepachet Baptist Church is a small, but very active, congregation of committed believers, with a rich history,
who are determined to grow and continue to share the Gospel with all who are willing to listen. Personal spiritual formation is one of our most important missions. Service to the community is another. Please visit Our Pastor's Greetings!
Our services are every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM in the historic Chepachet Meeting House, located on Route 44 in the village of Chepachet, RI, about 200 feet west of its intersection
with Route 102 (where the town's only stoplight is located). The church is partly visible from that intersection. See our Directions and Map.
Prayer, scripture, message, and music form the principal parts of our services. With respect to music, we have a blended service of traditional hymns accompanied by organ music, and contemporary praise songs accompanied by a guitar.
Our Sunday School meets in the church vestry during the second half of the worship service, with children departing for it before the message. Young children are always welcome at our church.
We celebrate Holy Communion the first Sunday in every month, and we recognize in our services the important events of the Christian calendar. We helped found and actively participate in an
ecumenical Thanksgiving service with other churches in town. Please visit Our Service page for more details.
Services are followed by a coffee hour.
Despite our historical name, we are unaffiliated, non-denominational in spirit, and theologically varied, but true to the essentials of evangelical belief and faith. We are committed first to being people who love God so that from us will flow the work of God. We are a people of worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry, and missions. We strive to have a
meaningful impact on our community, and to help people find peace with God. We recently adopted a statement of belief which sets forth what we affirm to be the essentials of Biblical Christianity and
the foundations of our faith and practices. To review its specific contents, please visit Our Beliefs. All who believe in our amazing Lord and his message of love and mercy, and all who commit
themselves to Jesus as God's offer of forgiveness are welcome in our midst -- as are those who seek answers through exploring their beliefs. In this regard, our pastor's recent sermons are to be found
on this website.
We enjoy gathering every Sunday in the historic and beautifully restored Chepachet Meeting House where we have met for nearly two centuries. Please visit Our Historic Meeting House page. For more than one of those centuries, our congregation has sung its hymns to the warmly rich music of the E.W. Lane
tracker pipe organ, which is played every Sunday by our talented organist. And we have recently restored (with the help of the Champlain Foundation) our ancient Meeting House carriage shed,
one of three remaining in Rhode Island (and one of a couple dozen remaining throughout New England).
People join our church upon profession of faith either by baptism or by letter from another congregation, and will be received by the right hand of fellowship. We invite parents of young
children to bring them to church for a special service of Dedication to Christ.
Like many New England churches, we have been challenged by issues of membership, and many of our folks are reaching an advanced age. But we also have young families
, and their presence encourages our hopes for continued congregational renewal and lasting vitality. We are remarkably active for a small congregation. We support missionaries in Cameroon. We
support local charities and the Glocester Food Bank. For the last twenty-five years we have sponsored a Music at the Meeting House series of six to eight performances a year (fall and spring),
presenting a wide variety of quality music (on a free-will offering basis) to concert-goers from all over Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut. We sponsor an annual Easter Egg Hunt
for young children in the town. We take part in Chepachet's Memorial Day Parade. We often participate in Chepachet's Fourth of July Parade. We sponsor study series. For a summary of our
outreach activities, please visit our Community Outreach and Overseas Missions pages.
Our website, developed over the years, is a rich source of historical information about the town and its institutions, and about our own church history, the Meeting House's
history, New England Meeting House architecture in general, and the very special G. W. Holbrook steeple bells (cast in nearby Massachusetts), of which we proudly have one of the oldest. For more
historical details, you may wish to glance at the page entitled A Brief History, or you may wish to visit the many in-depth analyses found on the Our History page of this site. These include narratives
about John Colby (one of our founders), Old Home Days, Pastor Alexander Morrell's Diary, the Dorr Rebellion, and the pages on Holbrook Bells.
We have a vision for growing our congregation and extending our outreach to folks new to the area, new to our faith, and new to belief itself. Our congregation is drawn primarily from
northwest Rhode Island, and includes members from Glocester, Burrillville, Foster, Scituate, Smithfield, and North Smithfield. Some folks come from nearby Connecticut, and others from even greater distances --
we would welcome folks from anywhere throughout the region.
We are historically traditional and will remain sensitive to our roots. But we are also open to the Spirit moving us and adapting us to the times and to the growing community. Our
"blended" form of service is responsive to new trends and practices in worship. Our outreach efforts are expanding.
We recently sponsored a marvelously inspired series (called "Alpha") for those
who wished to know more about the Lord -- and about themselves. We are experimenting with the use of facebook and other vehicles of social media. We are in the process of producing CDs and
website visuals with beautiful inspiring music for distribution to shut-ins and residents of assisted living complexes. We are constantly looking for new ways to serve the Lord and help the community.
It is in this spirit that we proclaim: Something new is happening at the oldest church in town!
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