Our Story
Every church has a story. Ours starts in a living room.
1971. Joe Pardini ran a Christian bookstore on Bank Street in downtown Attleboro, and a little book about the Holy Spirit stirred something in him that wouldn’t settle. So a group started gathering in his living room on Friday nights to pray. Within a couple of months there were forty of them, and the living room couldn’t hold everybody anymore.
At the same time, across town, a band was plugging in at a coffee house called The Ark, young musicians sharing the love they’d found in Jesus with anyone who wandered in for the music.
A prayer meeting and a coffee house, converging into one congregation: Faith Bible Chapel. Nobody in that living room was planning a church. They were praying, and responding, and when God opened a door they walked through it ready.
The early decades. The stories from those years sound almost too ordinary to be from God, which is exactly how He seems to like it. A flower shop by the barn that brought people onto the property who’d never have come for a service. A couple who invited people into their home for a shared meal to help people feel seen and connected. Families helping a young Christian school find its feet. Teachers teaching teachers, meals for neighbors, hands in Haiti and at the food bank and in senior housing.
1989. The church took a new name, Community Covenant Church, because it said exactly who God was calling that generation to be: a community, bound to God and to each other.
Making room. Here’s a detail we love. This building used to sit hidden behind a stand of trees. People drove past for years without knowing a church was here. So the church cut the trees down. Not because the trees were in the way, but because we were. Long before anyone had words for why, this church knew how to make room.
The in-between years. Like every long story, ours has hard chapters; seasons of goodbyes, uncertainty, and endings that left a mark. We don’t pretend otherwise. But every time this church has been brought to its knees, God has moved. That part of the story has never changed.
2021. Josh Reich and his family arrived: carrying, though they’d told no one, a prayer that God would lead them somewhere their family could thrive.
2023. Reading Genesis 26, Josh landed on the story of Isaac digging wells. The third well, the one nobody fought him for, Isaac named Rehoboth. “Now the LORD has given us room, and we will flourish in the land.” Rehoboth means open space. Room. And another word for flourish is thrive. Our church sits in a town called Rehoboth. Some things you can’t make up.
2026. After years of praying about what God was calling us into next, we became Thrive Community Church; helping people thrive in their relationships with God, themselves, and others. The name is new. The story is fifty-five years old.
Were you part of it? If you were there — the living room, the Ark, the barn, or any stretch in between — your story is part of our story, and we’re still collecting them. Tell us your story → /connect