Led by Pastor Gene Giguere

Harvest Community Church undergoes remodeling thanks to generous donor

By RUSS OLIVO rolivo@woonsocketcall.com

WOONSOCKET – The folks who run Harvest Community Church are what you might call givers.

They give homeless men a mat and a warm place to sleep when it’s cold outside.

The give spiritual guidance to at-risk kids who live in the projects.

And once a year they give the whole city a chance to enjoy Christian music and art at the annual Sunsplash festival.

“We’ve always been the kind of church that invests in the community,” says Associate Pastor Steve Bacon. “We’ve been doing that for 15 years.”

Located in a refurbished, red-brick furniture warehouse on North Main Street, the evangelical Christian flock has generally forsaken its own needs to focus on those of others, but that is about to change.

Thanks to an anonymous donation, Harvest Community Church will invest the lion’s share – about $30,000 – into remodeling the hall where church members worship

To accommodate the growing flock, the hall has been enlarged and will be reconfigured with a new pulpit overlooking a half-round amphitheater. There will be room enough to seat about 135 worshippers in the hall, which has gained about 200 square feet after contractors blew out one of the existing walls.

Smelling of freshly cut wood and chalky drywall, the project is currently a work in progress, with power tools, lumber and staging scattered around the church’s traditional worship area like so many children’s toys. But Bacon says it’s just a matter of weeks before the new hall is finished.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide worshippers with a quiet space that allows them to put some distance between themselves and the hubbub of everyday life, a place for reflection and prayer.

“It should sanctified, a place that’s conducive to worship,” said Bacon.

Led by Pastor Gene Giguere, a Blackstone native, the church has hired Steve Brassard as a general contractor for the project, but Bacon is sharing much of the labor. Some of the overnight guests from the church’s well-known Sanctuary Ministry – aka the overnight shelter for men – are also providing some of the elbow grease.

Established 17 years ago, Harvest Community Church is perhaps best known for the Sanctuary Ministry, which operates the only overnight shelter for single men in northern Rhode Island. Open from Nov. 1 to roughly mid-April every year, the church currently provides shelter to about 30 homeless men.

The shelter provides guests with a mat to sleep on, a portable compartment in which to store their belongings, facilities for laundering their clothes and for taking a shower. It’s strictly an overnight facility, however – guests have to check out in the morning and return before they lock up the doors in the early evening.

The word on the street is that the place is a regular Hilton compared to some of the other homeless shelters for men elsewhere in the state – which are few and far between.

“There’s no stealing, there’s no fighting,” says a guy named Joe who’s helping out with the remodeling project. “It’s really mellow.”

Bacon says the need for homeless beds is as acute as ever.

“We get at least two or three calls a week,” he says. “I had a waiting list two pages long.”

As an evangelical Christian community, Bacon says, the church’s guiding principal is missionary in nature, which means it’s dedicated to spreading the word of God to places where it might not be quite so audible. Though the church seldom seeks publicity for doing so, Giguere leads a missionary delegation from the church to Haiti twice a year.

But the church’s primary focus is overwhelmingly closer to home – reaching out through the Sanctuary Ministry and other community based programs. Among other things, the church runs the “J-Rock” at Morin Heights Family Housing Development, a faith-based outreach program for pre-teens who live in the subsidized housing project.

Every September, the church sponsors “Sunsplash” at River Island Park, a Christian arts and music festival that is open to the public.

Though its roots are firmly planted at 60 North Main St. – a mill-era brick warehouse – the church grew from humble beginnings in the late 1990s – before it even had a place to call home.

At the time, Giguere was the associate pastor of an evangelical church in the Fall River area. A small group of followers used to hold a regular “praise night” in the basement of Precious Blood Parish.

As the weekly gathering gained more and more followers, Giguere decided to launch his own church in the city – setting up shop in a shack-like building on Arnold Street that had previously operated as a nightclub.

When the growing congregation had the opportunity to relocate two years later, they took it, purchasing the former Parenteau Furniture Store – its current location. The store had operated in the city for many years, but like so many other furniture stores in the city, it couldn’t compete with the big box vendors and decided to close its doors.

As he stood amid the lumber and power tools in the church hall, Bacon seemed to sense how odd it was to be there, for the Parenteau Furniture Store was an institution he knew quite well.

“I bought a refrigerator in this place,” he said. “When I first moved out of my parents’ house. I was probably 18 or 19 year old.”

Follow Russ Olivo on Twitter @russolivo