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.