CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When Ange-Therese Akono arrived in the U.S. two years ago, the Cameroon-born student felt overwhelmed. She knew few people and was entering an intense civil engineering master’s program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A fellow student suggested she visit Pentecostal Tabernacle, a nearby Cambridge church said to be welcoming to students like her.
“I walked in and I could feel the glory of God,” says Akono, now 23. “There were a lot of students from all over the world there … singing and praising. I’ve been coming ever since.”
For Pentecostal Tabernacle, a small historically Black church sitting in between MIT and Harvard, attracting students like Akono has rejuvenated its once struggling congregation. Just 15 years ago, membership fell to just three dozen. But now it claims more than 350 members thanks to an aggressive recruitment of immigrants and international students captivated by senior pastor Brian Greene’s sermons on social justice, immigrant rights and “restoring broken lives.”
“It’s a place where we can all be as one, no matter where we come from,” says Offiong Bassey, 25, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. “We let our guards down and got through what we need to go through.”
The change happened, Greene says, when God directed this Pentecostal church created in 1927 by Barbadian immigrants to take on a new mission after years of decline: start servicing the sojourner.
About 10 years ago, members began intense weekly prayer sessions asking God to bring in new members, or “partners,” as Greene calls them. “When the pews were empty, we would pray to the east and ask God to send people in from that direction,” remembers Greene, a long-time member who was born a few houses from the church. “But we were thinking East Cambridge … not Eastern Europe. We had no idea what God had in store for us.”
Today, a balcony once used only for storage is filled to capacity every Sunday. Energetic services are shown on closed-circuit TV in the church’s function hall for those squeezed out of the main church.
