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FOXBORO - Eight-year-old Veronica Todd, a third-grader at Living Waters Christian Academy in Foxboro, says "Aesop's Fables" is one of her favorite books.

"There are different stories in it and you can learn by them," the child says. "You can learn that it isn't always about winning. You can always have a second try."

Veronica has some outstanding role models close at hand.

Her mother, Kirsten Joseph, teaches at the academy and her grandmother, Katrina Joseph, is the head of school.

"There's a closeness here," Katrina Joseph said of the academy, which was founded in Norwood and opened its second campus this school year, with 70 students in grades kindergarten through eight, in the First Baptist Church building at Mechanic and Chestnut Street. "It's still small enough so that we can have that relationship." A spiritual closeness also exists among the three Christian groups that occupy separate parts of the building: a small Baptist congregation; the academy; and The River Community Church, also known as Foxboro Foursquare Church.

The sharing arrangement - with Foxboro Foursquare leasing sole use of the main sanctuary - represents a hope-filled second try for a facility that had seen a dwindling of Baptist church membership and the loss of its settled minister, Rev. Michael Hodge, who has moved back to Illinois with his family.

"We all want to try to accomplish the same thing," Joseph said. "We are ministries. We are doing unto God. With us understanding that similarity, we are able to work together. We're going beyond denomination boundaries, and we're serving the Lord."

The three groups' ability to share with each other may also be a model of economy in tough financial times.

"It's just a wonderful fit, with the whole building," said Rev. Michael Bave, pastor of The River Community Church. "Three totally different entities can work together. It's such a wonderful solution to such a huge building."

To Mike Denekamp of Childs Lane, an elder in a Baptist congregation that fell from about 350 in the late 1980s to a dozen or two faithful now holding Sunday services in the church lounge, the presence of a Christian school, and the full use of the building, fulfills a 40-year-old-vision.

Denekamp said some members of the church took out second mortgages on their home in the 1960s to help pay for the new Baptist church, which was built to house a Christian school but until this fall never had one. Instead, the extra rooms were put to a variety of uses over the years, sometimes drawing rental income from groups such as a job-search group.

"We feel blessed because we're seeing an answer to that prayer from 40 years ago," Denekamp said. "It's exciting to see the building used six or seven days a week. The space is finally being used to its full potential."

The Baptists

For a while, it looked like the opposite was about to happen. The Baptist congregation melted away in recent years to a point where the church could no longer afford to pay its minister, Denekamp said.

"It's almost unexplainable," Denekamp said of the exodus from the pews. "The congregation dwindled to where we couldn't in good faith continue assuming that Rev. Hodge and his family could remain in the church when we could not pay him."

Rev. Hodge had been serving the church for about 14 years and resided with his family in the parsonage at 123 Mechanic St.

He and youth pastor Jon Varney were given severance packages funded by the sale the parsonage, Denekamp said. The colonial house, located on 1.4 acres, was sold on May 2 for $355,600, according to town records. The two pastors left in June, he said.

First Baptist Church still owns the main church, located on 5.5 acres and assessed by the town at $3.5 million, plus a second parsonage at 130 Chestnut St., assessed at $381,600.

But the greater legacy of the local Baptist movement is the faith held by the congregation, however small, said Denekamp, who serves on a leadership team with elder John Goetz of North Attleboro.

The work of the church goes on. For example, member Dawn Mattera of Norton this summer worked in orphanages in Romania for six weeks, a church-sponsored mission Mattera has undertaken for many summers.

The Sunday services, held at 10:45 a.m. with live guitar and piano music, offer sermons by a series of guest ministers and other speakers, including former associate pastor Noel Sherry, who now lives in Grafton.

Sherry, who served the church from about 1988 to 2000, preached in July and expects to preach again in the near future. "My hope and prayer for them is that they call an interim pastor who can build it back up," Sherry said.

Foxboro recorded its first baptism of a person of the Baptist faith in 1808, according to town historian Jack Authelet.

As a result of the Great Awakening revival 1815, a Baptist Society was formed in Foxboro in 1816. The following year, a movement began to establish a formal church. The group held services in the Meeting House on Foxboro Common, along with the Congregationalists.

In 1822, the Meeting House was torn down, and the Baptists built their own church building on Elm Street.

That structure was moved to the site of the present town hall, Authelet said. In 1850, the First Baptist Church was erected facing The Common on the lot now occupied by Bank of America. That structure was torn down when the present building at 115 Mechanic Street was built in the mid-1994.

Rev. Sherry said the building was constructed by the late Neil Ferguson, a member who shared the vision of housing a church school.

River Community Church

The River Community Church, which over the years had met at in a host of locations in Foxboro before leasing the former First Baptist sanctuary, once saw more than its share of water. Bave said the congregation was flooded out of its basement location at 36 Mechanic Street about 10 years ago.

The congregation has worshipped in members' homes, in leased space at the Taylor Elementary School and at South Foxboro Community Center.

For a church that uses many musical instruments in its lively, contemporary worship service, the Taylor School and the community center were less than ideal locations, requiring the constant setting up and removal of the instruments, Bave said.

But the congregation made do - and grew.

"The church is not a building," Bave said last Sunday in his sermon. "We have lost a number of buildings in the past and we are a church."

During the service, hand puppets that resemble the Muppets reinforced that message as they merrily chatted with Ciel Riveras, a member of Hands of Praise, the church's puppet team.

Contemporary Christian music plays an even bigger role in the worship service. Rev. Bave, who grew up in Wales, was an itinerant musician and preacher in the United Kingdom and Europe before leading his first church, in Aldershot, south of London. He came Foxboro Foursquare Church in 1993 as minister.

A guitarist and singer, his original music includes a CD titled Open Door. Bave lives in Norfolk with his wife, Mary.

Last summer, 25 members of the church took a mission trip to South Wales, entirely taking over a small hotel, living and working together with a common purpose.

Just as First Baptist, River Community, and Living Waters are doing in Foxboro.

"We just have different flavors, but we're all one in Christ," Rev. Bave said.