After sharing space with churches in Wainscott and East Hampton for nearly 14 years, the Vida Abundante New York congregation will finally have a home of its own this spring as it moves into the historic St. Thomas Chapel in Amagansett.
Vida Abundante will hold its first service there on Sunday at 10 a.m. to introduce its members to the space, its pastor, Oswaldo Palomo, said last week. Regular services will begin on Palm Sunday.
For more than nine years Vida Abundante has been based at the Living Water Church in Wainscott, offering services in Spanish on Sundays at 5 p.m., with simultaneous English translation for a growing number of members or their children who do not speak Spanish as a first language. In its early years, the congregation met at the East Hampton Methodist Church.
The move to Amagansett represents a sort of coming of age for the nondenominational congregation. For the first time since its founding, Vida Abundante — some 140 members strong with an average of about 70 attending weekly services — will be able to offer worship on Sunday morning. “For the last 14 years it was kind of hard because having services at 5 really breaks up your day,” Mr. Palomo said. “Also, we’ll be more exposed to people as far as location is concerned.”
The new space will not allow for simultaneous translation, but in time, Mr. Palomo hopes that his son, Diego Palomo, the church’s youth pastor, will lead a second Sunday morning service in English. The younger Mr. Palomo grew up here, graduated from East Hampton High School, and recently returned after living for a time in Florida.
On Friday, father and son stopped by St. Thomas, which is owned by St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton, to talk about Vida Abundante’s vision for the future and the role it hopes to play in the broader East Hampton community. “We love the community, we love the town, and we’d like to give back,” Oswaldo Palomo said.
“Everybody wants to take from the Hamptons whatever they can . . . to take advantage,” said his son. “We want to serve the community.”
To that end, Vida Abundante established an I Love My Town ministry to be a force for good wherever it might be needed.
Vida Abundante members have volunteered to clean or drive for the elderly at the Windmill and St. Michael’s housing complexes, for example, and helped a family without a car move from Montauk to East Hampton, among other good deeds large and small.
While church services are conducted in Spanish, Vida Abuntante’s volunteer efforts cut across language barriers. “Most of the families that we have helped are American families,” Mr. Palomo said.
“There is a whole side of this community that people don’t know,” his son said. The Vida Abundante congregation aims “to be a pillar of what we want the change to be.”
Many people know the older Mr. Palomo from the baseball diamond. A player himself, he was an assistant baseball and softball coach at East Hampton High School. He also serves as secretary of the Windmill Village board of directors, which oversees two senior citizens housing complexes in East Hampton.
Mr. Palomo grew up in Costa Rica in the Methodist Church, which in that country is “very conservative, very traditional,” he said. Vida Abundante, which was started in Costa Rica and now boasts congregations across Latin America and in the United States “is more contemporary,” he said, and puts a big focus on working with youth, part of the reason that Sunday services are translated into English.
Mr. Palomo, who is fluent in English, was against the translation at first, believing the church would be stronger if its congregation knew Spanish, regardless of what they were learning at school, but his son impressed upon him the importance of embracing the change. “My son said, ‘Daddy, we think in English.’ ” His son’s wife, Jill, who is also a youth pastor, is from Canada and grew up in an English-speaking household, and there are more and more families in the church with similar stories.
“Our congregation is exactly what New York is known for; it’s multicultural,” Diego Palomo said. “We have people from Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, and America. . . . They’re hard-working individuals: contractors, painters, carpenters, housekeepers, hotel managers, realtors, estate managers.”
The older Mr. Palomo worked in property management for many years and continued to be “bi-vocational,” as he put it, until March of 2018, when he became a full-time pastor. In the two years since then he has thrown himself into strengthening his own congregation and also helping to train nearly 2,000 new pastors and leaders in Cuba, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Mexico, Texas, and on Long Island through the Building Lives Network, an interdenominational group of half a dozen pastors from this country and Costa Rica.
Since September alone, Mr. Palomo has traveled twice to Nicaragua, twice to Costa Rica, and twice to Texas. Later this year he will go with his Building Lives colleagues to Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.
His efforts are inspired, in large part, by a philosophy he came across in a book introduced to him by the head pastor in the Costa Rican church, Ricardo Salazar. “A Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren, an American pastor, offered a framework for the vision Mr. Palomo already had for his church, his son said.
At its heart is the “PEACE Plan,” a roadmap for addressing the “global giants that attack humanity,” Mr. Palomo said. Mr. Warren identifies those “giants” as “loneliness, selfish or corrupt leadership, poverty, sickness, and illiteracy.” PEACE is an acronym for “Plant churches that promote reconciliation, Equip servant leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, and Educate the next generation.”
Mr. Palomo has taken that plan deeply to heart at his church, in his hometown, and in the broader world.
Five years ago, Vida Abundante created an English as a second language academy, with classes held on Monday nights at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. It started with a dozen students and now has 10 times that. “The greatest part of the E.S.L. program for me is the volunteers,” Mr. Palomo said. “We have retired teachers, architects, accountants. They’re giving us their time, their heart, their passion. To me, that’s a miracle.”
“We want to help people assimilate, to learn the language so they can be active in school, communicate with their kids,” Diego Palomo said, adding that he thinks often of something his father said on that front: “I will forever eat rice and beans, but . . . we need to respect this country and learn how to live here.”
After this Sunday’s service, Vida Abundante services will return to the Living Water Church until Palm Sunday. Easter weekend will be full of activities at the new Amagansett location. Ricardo Salazar, the Vida Abundante pastor from Costa Rica, will be on hand, and a band from the Hillsong church in Monterrey, Mexico, will perform contemporary Christian music.
