New England Chapel in Franklin, Massachusetts may conjure up images of a white steeple and impressive stained glass windows. But Scott Brown’s church is nothing special on the outside. It’s hidden in a drab industrial park in Franklin and only identified as a church with a plain sign that reads “New England Chapel.” It’s what happens inside the warehouse that makes congregants excited.

“It is a church for people who have given up on religion but not God,” said Rob Penchuck, a neighbor of Brown’s and a church member. “People who still have faith that there’s a superior being and believe in God. But there are many people that are disenfranchised with the formalities and sometimes the hypocrisy of churches that have become clubs, in a sense.”

Penchuck said the service has a rock band, and no one looks down on you if you wear jeans. There’s a cross section of ages and people coming from other religions.

National church leaders said the sermon is the most important part of Sunday services. The chapel posts recent sermons on its Web site. One by Pastor Chris Mitchell encourages people to pray for Haiti after the earthquake:

“The best thing that we can do here is pray, and hopefully that you develop some kind of prayer trigger or prayer reminder in your life and if you didn’t, you can, you know, starting this week, you know, do something like take your watch off your normal hand and put it on your other hand and then every time you feel it, saying, ‘Well that feels weird over there,’ it reminds you to pray. “

Prayer, and the centrality of God, are some of the key components of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, a Protestant Christian denomination. The church has fewer than 300,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, mostly in Michigan and Iowa.

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