TRURO — On a bright spring Sunday, the sound of gospel music fills a small chapel in North Truro. The verses flow over pastel-colored hats worn by women in the front row, who are dancing with palms high in the air. Everyone is on their feet at the Chapel on the Pond, which was called Our Lady of Perpetual Help during the nearly 100 years it was a Catholic church.
A guest pastor steps up to the microphone. He is Donovan Kerr of New Life Ministries International in Hyannis. He starts conversationally, then lets loose a crescendo of thunderous waves that are capped with a repeated “Thank God for Jesus.” Parishioners call back to him in agreement.
His sermon gets personal. He explains how he began to stray from the church but was pulled back. He advises the men in the room to attend services with the same consistency as the women (who outnumber them in the pews). He offers his own two cents on how to stay married. His fiery manner is very different from the man who usually occupies the pulpit of the North Truro chapel, Pastor David Brown.
Brown, 63, has a quieter demeanor, but he is the one who began building up this predominantly Jamaican congregation in 2017. His wife, Carlene, is the daughter of a pastor in Jamaica; she has the voice of a woman who was born to sing.
The couple met in her father’s church and married there in 1985, Pastor Brown said. In the early 1990s the pair came to Provincetown on H-2B temporary worker visas. David started at the Lobster Pot and both he and his wife worked in various restaurants over the next two decades, shuttling between two countries while raising four children. They now live in Eastham.
When they began attending the small cedar-shake-clad Chapel on the Pond in 2017, Brown was not sure he wanted to be a pastor here. He had been ordained in 1997 and served as a Sunday school superintendent and secretary of the Youth Fellowship Association at the Emmanuel Faith Church of God in Jamaica.
The Truro congregation was small and just trying to establish itself in the community. They said they needed him. He prayed about it and told them yes.
The church had been built in 1915 to serve the Outer Cape’s burgeoning Portuguese Catholic population. It closed in 2007, and the Diocese of Fall River sold the chapel to Bob and Kathy Valleau in 2009 for $385,000, according to assessor’s records.
The Independent reached Kathy Valleau by email, but she declined to be interviewed. The church’s website says they are the founders of Boathouse Ministries, and in recent years they have been traveling the Pacific, North Atlantic, and Mediterranean on their boat Vesper.
The Valleaus renovated the church in 2009 and added a kitchen in 2019. Since Brown became pastor, he and Carlene have been trying to build up attendance.
Winters are the busiest time here, with 30 to 100 people attending Sunday services, Brown said. Members of his congregation, who are mostly Jamaican, are often too busy working in summer to attend regularly, he added.
Attending the Chapel is different from other churches around here, said the pastor. “Most U.S. churches are more lukewarm,” said Brown. “We are spiritual, Pentecostal, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, full of joy. We come and celebrate.”
Coming to church renews one’s connection with what’s important, Brown said. “Worship keeps you in alignment with God,” and being together with a community of people enhances the spirit. Brown described worshiping together as “iron sharpening iron. We brighten each other. We all leave each other revived and refreshed.”
