Pittsburgh NCD Tour - House of Manna

Met with Eugene “Freedom” Blackwell and his wife “Free” at House of Manna and Homewood Rennaisance.   (A missional faith community and a non-profit – the describe it as two buildings with a bridge across).  They do super intentional relational ministry in a poor African-American neighborhood called Homewood.

Rev. Blackwell started as the pastor of a church which had been in the neighborhood for a long time, but as the members became more financially well off, it became a commuter church which didn’t serve the neighborhood any more.  Rev. Blackwell decided to start a ministry which would  really be of, for, and in the neighborhood.   They worship out on a street corner during the summer and have a building but are really intentional about merging their service work with their spiritual work and in particular about building trust and relationships in the community.  They started out by doing a ton of service work in the neighborhood and by going door to door, doing food and toy drives, and just hanging out at bus stops, street corners, etc.

Their worship is very participatory and very fitting for the community.  They use spoken word, hip hop, a DJ, and sometimes Rev. Blackwell preaches, but he has a team that rotates. They were really hard on discipleship and leadership development.   He develops 3 or 4 people at a time and sends them to develop other leaders themselves.

They said that one of the things they were the most proud of about their church is that when people come into the neighborhood and ask on the street “Where is House of Manna?” their members say “How can I help you?” rather than pointing them to a building or giving them Rev. Blackwell’s phone number.

They also said one of the things they believe in is not judging suburban churches who just want to give money to their project or who maybe send mission trip but don’t really commit to the neighborhood.  Everyone is where they are and they want to serve however they can and God uses that to further everyone’s ministry.  That said, they did have to turn down an offer for $100,000 one time because the restrictions that were on it did not match the identity of their ministry.

Because they serve an economically depressed neighborhood, most of their funding comes from other churches, grants, the Presbytery, etc. and they don’t necessarily see that changing in the near future.

They also really talked about their own personal spiritual journeys and how they really felt like the way they started the church put them through a spiritual refinement process where they were forced into relying on God because it was too overwhelming and too scary to think they could do it on their own.  They emphasized being spiritually centered and remembering that God is ultimately the only one that the church obeys and being faithful and taking leaps of faith is how God’s work gets done and how we get to see God’s glory revealed.  I felt like it was an appropriate last visit in that it was humbling, encouraging, and challenging.

They also had to launch multiple times with different groups and different parts of the community, so they said not to get discouraged if there were false starts.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - Vera White: Presbytery Director of NCDs

Met with Vera White who is the Presbytery Director of NCD's.  She suggested that the core team of our church plant use the PCUSA "Starting New Churches" discernment guide to give us more direction in our discernment process.  It's 17 sessions and some churches have done retreats at the beginning, middle, and/or end to get a couple of the session done in one shot.  She said it would help us get to a more concrete idea of what we believe, who we wanted to serve, and what we would need to do to serve them.  She also mentioned that the GA offered some grants for NCD starts even if the Presbytery didn't.

I think possibly the most interesting thing she said was that she sees her role as the left tackle (in football) for the NCD pastor who is the quarterback.  She sees her role as advocating for the NCD and in particular explaining why the Presbytery needs another church when it already has so many (and when many of them are struggling).  She said that she takes a lot of flak on behalf of the NCD's (from established churches) but she gives them the space they need to do what they need to do.

We also talked a bit about the balance between living in ambiguity and structure and of all the potential dangers that ego can play.

Our visit was really encouraging.  Please pray for Vera as she discerns what's next for her after she leaves her position in July.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community

Met with Jeff from Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community and Jen, their intern.  Hot Metal Bridge is named after the bridge on Hot Metal Street which was named after the steel mills that used to be there.  It wasn’t a theological move or anything like that.  Hot Metal Bridge is PCUSA and Methodist and does a homeless ministry twice a week where they open their doors and serve whoever comes in.  They do communion every Sunday and have a meal every Sunday after worship.  Food is a big part of their community.

Jeff said that when they started, they (he and Jim, the other pastor) did a “vision lunch” where he invited everyone who might be even remotely interested and pitched them the idea of doing a non-traditional community centered church plant.  They got an 18 month grant from the Presbytery and started doing worship once a month in an old Goodwill store.  Jeff said he spent a lot of time hanging out in the community in coffee shops and prayer walking the neighborhood because he didn’t know what else to do.   They did monthly worship for 2 years before they started doing weekly worship.  Eventually they did discipleship classes and part of that was doing a thanksgiving meal for the homeless, which eventually became their twice a week homeless meal.

One big takeaway was that they were constantly evaluating what they did and even when things worked well, they didn’t feel the need to repeat them.  Jen said she really appreciated the flexibility at Hot Metal Bridge, where they could try all kinds of stuff and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and it was all okay.  They were comfortable throwing things up and seeing what stuck and not feeling too bad if it didn’t.

The other interesting thing was that he said they had arrived at a place where a lot of the things they said they weren’t going to be about (having and maintaining a building, hiring staff etc.) were the things they needed to think about now.  With 250 people they could support it, but they had to start thinking again for a different perspective what it meant to be “non-traditional church” in almost the opposite way of thinking about what it meant to be church when they first started.   That said, they turned their upstairs area into lofts that were just available to people who were visiting the community and needed a place to stay, so the space is still very non-traditional in its usage.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - The Open Door

Met with BJ from The Open Door.  It's a church of about 90 people which rents space in an old church building that is a combined use space: there's also a pottery studio, an acupuncture/yoga studio, a consulting firm, and 3 other tenants.  They're really focused on spiritual practice and discernment individually, as a church, and for their community.  They take seriously the idea that the individual's spiritual health will directly affect the spiritual health of the church which will directly affect the spiritual health of the community.  They make it a point to engage their community in dialog (sometimes doing listening meetings, sometimes doing prayer walks and hanging out in local establishments, sometimes just going door to door and asking people what they thought of the neighborhood they lived in and what it needed).  They take seriously the idea of the church outside the walls and have started an urban garden in a poorer neighborhood.  They also try to be very permission giving and also recognize that most of their "programs" (bible studies, small groups, etc.) are short lived - maybe 2 months.  People gather around different topics or areas of life and meet for a while and when things run out of gas, they are free to let them go and try something.  They try to partner with other Presbyterian and other churches in the neighborhood, realizing that they can't do it all.  For instance, they send their kids to one of the established Presbyterian Church's youth group and they all go to the midweek Holy Week services and Ash Wednesday services of an established Presbyterian Church.

They started as a second worship of an established church, but after they started growing, they realized that the character of the people who were coming to the second worship service (which was called the Open Door) was not at all like the character of the people so they discerned together that they should be their own church.  The space that they became a part of kind of fell into their lap.  Some people had bought an old church building and said they wanted it to be a mixed use space, but they wanted one of the tenants to be a church, and so they became that church.

BJ mentioned that he wished they hadn't started with worship as a focal point.  In particular, because they already had "their way" of doing worship from the original setting as a second service of the established church, when they moved into their own space in a different neighborhood it was much harder to adapt their worship to the community they were in.  He almost cautioned against making worship too big a part early on, because it had the potential to suck up a lot of time and energy that should be spent on missional engagement.

Pittsburgh NCD Tour - The Upper Room

I met with Mike and Chris from The Upper Room in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  They started in 2008 right out of Presbytery and are both bi-vocational.  They received a grant and were both ordained into the NCD.  Upper Room's mission is calling, equipping and sending and their core values are multicultural, sacramental, and missional.  (Mike described a mission as "why you exist", a vision as "what will happen because you exist", and a core values as "how will you get there.")  They serve a lot of students and focus on international students in particular.  Their mission is done formally in some ways: they partner with an organization that helps welcome international students and they partner with an organization that helps people bring houses up to code, but they put more emphasis on mission as part of the culture of the church and part of the lives of the people, rather than a "church event."  When people moved away from the church, they would commission them to be missionaries wherever they were going.  In church, Chris talked about the people he encountered in his other job (a barista at local cafe) and how he was trying to be a presence for Christ in that environment.

They started first by prayer walking the different neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and finding a neighborhood that they really felt needed the kind of mission that they were passionate about.  They gathered a core team of some people who had been praying for their discernment and friends of friends into Chris' living room to pray.  They started on Sunday nights (and eventually moved to Sunday morning because of all the grad students who wanted to study on Sunday nights) and began adding elements of worship into their meetings - communion, preaching, etc.  Eventually that become Upper Room.

I think the biggest take away for me in my meeting with Mike and Chris was a reassurance that this stuff is actually possible.  Their story and the story of Upper Room isn't remarkably different from the path that I've begun to journey and some of the similarities (starting in the living room) gave me a lot of reassurance.  I do know that I need to be praying more and in particular, be more intentional about praying for the people I encounter and for God to lead me/us with some more structure.  I sort of have this idea that a voice will boom from the heavens and I'll know what I'm supposed to do, but perhaps I need to be listening for a still, small voice.

Keep Upper Room in your prayers as it's on the verge of outgrowing the space it's in and as they are one of the stops on the General Assembly tour of NCD's in Pittsburgh.