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But many do find themselves at evangelical churches like Park Street. "We get a lot of recovering Catholics," Harrell says.

There is rarely a direct move from the Catholic Church to Park Street, Harrell says. Rather people spend years disenchanted with church before trying out a new one. They are also looking for something more demanding than the church they grew up in.

Though former Catholics and university students have boosted the rolls of evangelical churches, most church growth comes from minority communities. Evangelical students have helped fuel the start of many young churches, Harrell says, but ethnic minorities, usually Asian, Brazilian, and Haitian, start more than half of new churches.

It's actually more than that, says Jeff Bass, executive director of Emmanuel Gospel Center, a Boston ministry that works to build churches in the city. Bass says that Boston's cultural elite of white, affluent professionals who live in loft apartments are the city's least churched demographic. The center's own research, Bass says, shows that 90 percent of all church plants are among minorities.

"This is something we have been documenting for the last 30 years," Bass says. In 1970, the Gospel Center drove through Boston, street by street, to discover why churches were dying. But what they found was startling. The big churches were dying as members stopped attending or left for the suburbs, as Bass expected. But small storefront churches full of minorities were growing. Historically, Boston's church growth always mirrored population growth. From the 1600s through the 1950s, when Boston's population grew, so did the number of churches. And when affluent residents fled to the suburbs, churches closed.

But Bass says they have been witnessing an unprecedented rate of church growth over the last 35 years, while the population has remained steady. In 1970, Bass and his team found 300 churches as they drove throughout Boston. Today, their research has documented 600 churches. "This is the longest sustained period of Christian growth," Bass says. "We call it the 'Quiet Revival.'"

Many of the leaders of these churches are bivocational, says Al Padilla, academic dean for Gordon-Conwell's Center for Urban Ministerial Education. "This has allowed the seminary a unique opportunity," says Padilla. Many pastors are eager for theological education, though time and finances prevent them from receiving a traditional seminary education. Padilla says Gordon-Conwell has had to be creative to find ways for many minority pastors to get a theological education. "You have a vast number desirous of education, but the financial resources are not there," Padilla says.

Training these bivocational pastors has a unique payoff, Padilla says. "These are people whose theology is beginning from scratch." This allows Gordon-Conwell to play a major role in shaping the character of the "quiet revival." "We have contributed a lot more significantly to the life of the church than most seminaries," Padilla says. "What students learn in classes is immediately used on the street."

Many of the immigrant churches are young, aggressively evangelistic, and conservative theologically. Padilla says they are often made up of migrant workers and poor laborers. They are very concerned about how the church should act in the public square, and they are progressive in social and urban issues.

These churches are not confined to Boston. David Midwood is president of Vision New England, an evangelism and discipleship ministry. Midwood attends one of the 40 Spanish-speaking churches in Lawrence, the poorest city in Massachusetts. Midwood says, "The most exciting thing [about the "quiet revival"] is the explosive growth of the multicultural church."

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50