Pastor Les Dancer Jr., formerly of Whitefield, gave his first message Sunday in a church that, a year ago, was headed for ruin. He too, he said, “was a broken man” before he turned his life around several years ago.
The newly constituted Sheepscot Valley Community Church, on the corner of Rt. 194 and Townhouse Road, drew about 25 people. Most were young couples, families with small children from Augusta where the parent church, Kennebec Valley Community Church (KVCC), is located.
Attending as well were several of Dancer’s relatives, including his mother, grandmother and great-aunt, adding a buzz of homecoming to the already friendly and energized atmosphere.
Resident Steve Smith, who paid to finish a volunteer re-roofing effort that bogged down in 2007, stepped in before the service began. He greeted Dancer and reached out with “Congratulations!” to Earl Lemieux, deacon of the former Whitefield Union Church and Full Gospel Fellowship, as the two shook hands.
The two men share a history of sparring over the church’s direction and ownership as its previous congregation dwindled. Smith sat on a local citizens’ church restoration committee when it appeared the historic building, challenged by steeple rot and severe water damage from the leaking roof, would have to close its doors.
Late last summer, KVCC Pastor Chris Johnson with his Southern Baptist connections stepped forward, seeking, with members of his Augusta congregation, to “plant” a church in Whitefield.
Resources from southern churches, principally Alabama, helped pay for removing the spire of the 140-year-old church’s ailing steeple last fall. In January, Johnson coordinated a volunteer work crew to sheetrock and paint the basement, and fix the ceiling. In March, an Alabama crew will paint the sanctuary walls.
Johnson said he was serving a Southern Baptist church six years ago in northern Alabama before coming to Maine to start a new, independent church, KVCC, where the congregation now numbers 150 on a good Sunday.
“I’m from the Bible Belt, and we didn’t need to start any more churches there. My wife and I felt led to Maine,” Johnson said. Father of two boys, he founded KVCC five years ago, and, two years ago, another church in Winthrop. “We love meeting new people. We enjoy the people here very much. They’re very friendly.”
He said there are 21 Southern Baptist churches in Maine “and we’re all very different. Some are more formal in their music, more traditional, also different in clothing. Each church has its own personality.”
Images and words blossomed and faded on a big screen while worship leader Mike Swett and his wife Elizabeth, cradling the couple’s infant daughter in a front carrier, sang into microphones.
Later, Johnson said services would also include live music on the electric piano once a musician could be found, and Dancer referred to the big screen as “eye worship,” a medium that appeals to video-oriented younger Christians.
Wearing a long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, the youthful 32-year-old pastor opened the service by asking people what they were thankful for. His grandmother, Louise Dancer, former longtime Whitefield school committee chairperson, recently had surgery for a benign brain tumor.
Temporarily in rehabilitation and looking forward to returning home, she said, “I’m thankful I’m alive. I want to love everybody and do all kinds of good things for people.”
Her words nailed the new church’s purpose and Dancer’s own reason for being there. His message, a riveting and candid account of his life until three or four years ago, spoke of the long, tortuous road of neglecting his health and wellbeing – of battling obesity as a sports-loving teen and 20-something, and of using and abusing drugs to numb both physical and emotional pain.
Meeting and dating Carrie, the woman he later married, wasn’t enough to wrest him from the many idols he said he worshiped and “invested so much money in.” That burden was primarily TV, drugs, and alcohol.
Although he grew up “a mile from here, and my parents loved me, and my grandmother lived next door,” Dancer said his take on church and Christians “was not a positive one because I viewed them as people who thought if you went to church and were good you went to heaven, (who thought) they were better than me.”
Dancer’s wild journey ended in the hospital, after he overdosed on antidepressants. “God reached in and said, ‘You’re done. You’re going with me,'” and that’s the point where, at his wife’s insistence, they started attending KVCC with their three small children.
Dancer, who now works for the state Dept. of Health and Human Services (“I decide if somebody gets food stamps or MaineCare”), felt comfortable with the people he met at KVCC. The message of the Bible, which he read cover to cover in three months, “started to get real to me,” he said.
Reading from Romans 3:10, Dancer said, “We all have issues, but God says, ‘I get that you’re messed up. You’re not to be perfect, but to be real.'” Gradually, he felt ready to serve, and after preaching in nursing homes, he heard the call to cast his net more widely. “God said, ‘You grew up in Whitefield, Maine, and I want you back there.’ So here we are.”
The church in America, including his new post in Kings Mills, “has got to get better at saying ‘come in’,” Dancer believes. He has been called to a place where congregants can be open about their mistakes, ask questions, and worship God in a spirit of praising and serving, as the website www.sheepscotchurch.org explains.
“Church is a great place to meet people,” he concluded, but cautioned, “Don’t let this become a country club. Let’s not make it about wall coverings or what kind of seats we sit in. It’s not about this building; it’s not about what you’re wearing. It’s about your heart.”
Family associations linger, however, as Dancer indicated when he gestured at the pew where his father’s great uncle Warren and great aunt Florence Russell used to sit. “We love the building, we want to be good stewards,” he said, but his mission is about meeting people’s needs, “it’s about planting churches. If we have people coming from other areas where a need is not being met, we’ll go there.”
Sheepscot Valley Community Church will hold a “food and friends” gathering next Sun., Feb. 14, after the 11 a.m. service. Meat and drinks will be provided. Those attending are asked to bring side dishes to share.
