AUBURN – A downtown church hopes to halt declining attendance with a new message: “God is still speaking.”

Its members hope folks are listening.

“We have a vibrant church and we have a lot to offer,” said Deacon Shawn Burns of the High Street Congregational Church. “We are reaching out.”

Banners with the “God is Still Speaking” slogan will hang from the church in coming weeks and on Sunday, April 13, parishioners plan to canvas the nearby neighborhood with pamphlets and invitations to parties, held on the last Friday night of each month.

“We don’t want anything from people,” Burns said. After all, the events are free. “We want to tell people we’re right here.”

The initiative was created by the United Church of Christ in 2004, aimed at welcoming people to the church and positioning it as relevant in people’s daily lives.

Nationally, the program caused a stir with TV commercials that were banned on some networks. One showed a bouncer at the front of a church, banning some ethnicities and gay people from the sanctuary.

“Jesus didn’t turn people away,” the ad continued. “Neither do we.”

The message of inclusion is part of what made the local church join the national effort, Burns said.

“We’re never going to turn someone away,” he said. That counts for race, sexual preference or money. “We’re never going to make somebody ashamed because they didn’t have a shirt and tie to wear on Sunday.”

It bears repeating at a time when their Sunday services have too many empty pews, typically drawing between 80 and 120 people while other local churches – East Auburn Baptist and Lewiston’s Vineyard Church – are bursting with 1,000 or more people each weekend.

“We studied them,” Burns said. “They are doing something right.”

Burns and a group from the High Street congregation (a part of the United Church of Christ since a 1957 merger) spent more than a year studying the “God is Still Speaking” program and their church’s place in the Auburn community.

They decided to sign on with the national initiative and focus their work on the local neighborhood. One of their findings was that an above-average number of the nearby residents were single parents with kids.

“We asked ourselves, ‘What are we doing to serve them?'” Burns said.

Services that the Congregational Church was already offering – such as a nursery school and child care during services, a vacation Bible school and adult study groups – might be going unnoticed by neighbors.

They quietly started the program at Christmastime with a Santa breakfast. Since then, they’ve had a trivia night and a square dance, but the real kickoff is scheduled for April 13.

Burns, who plans to become a Congregational minister, believes people will come. After all, he did.

When he moved to Auburn from Pennsylvania, he and his wife searched in the Yellow Pages to find a church. As a Catholic, he intended to go to a Catholic parish in the downtown and mistakenly entered High Street.

“We didn’t know we were in the wrong church until we were sitting in our pew,” Burns said. “God was on the turn signal that day.”

Burns and his wife have been members of the church for seven years. And like the slogan, Shawn Burns said he believes God is still speaking.

“He’s not done talking to us,” he said.