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.