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.