I’ll be 47 years old in July. Like most second career seminarians I’ve met, I had little if any idea why I was there, and to be honest, I had little idea of what seminary was supposed to be. My life to that point had been driven by a lot of things, none of which were God. I grew up 30 miles east of the city in a small town at the foothills of the Laurel Mountains, where I continue to live. I have an undergraduate degree in business and an MBA. Most of my life, and my identity, were wrapped up in my entrepreneurial endeavors. My new found focus on God came only after the destruction of everything I thought I knew about my life and what it was supposed to be. Three years ago when I first toured the Seminary, I found myself wandering through the halls of PTS with Director of Enrollment Derek Davenport and I clearly remember meeting then Church Planting Director Chris Brown that day. When Derek introduced Chris as the director of the Church Planting Initiative that was the first time I heard the words “church” and “planting” used together. For all I knew it might as well have been an initiative intended to restore the landscaping around aging church buildings.

Fast forward a few years and the creative, entrepreneurial spirit found in church planting and innovative ministry has been the easiest transition for me from self-driven endeavors to a God-driven life. I should think most everyone who knows me even a little would say it’s hard to see me in traditional church leadership/pastor rolls. Systems theorists might say I’m self-differentiated to an extreme, almost detrimental degree (extreme, almost detrimental is my default setting in life). As I have followed God through this strange blurry trip they call discernment, I’ve found myself most drawn to atypical pastoral leaders—community starters like PTS alums Chris Brown, Keith Kaufold, and Jeff Eddings[1]. I’ve been encouraged by their determination to follow God on the terms they hear God calling, regardless of the established church world around them.

Ministry on the streets of Pittsburgh

Through this discernment process, I have heard God call me to the streets, to minister to Pittsburgh’s homeless population. Almost by accident, I found myself building deep personal relationships with people from the street. I’m drawn to those struggling with addiction and mental illness, those who reject society first, out of fear that given the chance society would reject them. It is in these heavy circumstances that I hear Christ calling me to those who have lost him, or those who have yet to know him. They are drawn to me, and I to them, so I minister to them on their terms and their turf, under the bridges, along the tracks, in the middle of the street. As I do, I’ve recognized how hard it is to convince someone that there is hope in a God greater than anything in this world, when their world view is constricted by the eminent need to survive the next day, the next hour, the next minute.

Bridge to the Mountains

Two years ago, Keith Kaufold and I were rafting down the whitewater of the lower Youghiogheny River with 20 teenage summer campers when I turned to Keith and said, “can you imagine what it would be like to bring people from streets here?” That was the seed that eventually would grow into Bridge to the Mountains.  It started with a few trips bringing a few homeless individuals at a time up to the mountains to ride bikes along the river trail, ride the natural water slides, and just enjoy God’s wonder for a few hours. Eventually I raised some money and brought a group of 20 homeless, and homeless care providers white water rafting. That was a year ago. Today Bridge to the Mountains is a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation, and we are awaiting our 501 (C)(3) status. We are a Pittsburgh based Christian faith mission dedicated to developing relationships with, and providing a bridge of hope, to those experiencing homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and otherwise challenging life situations. By combining street outreach and the coordination of services with other providers throughout the city with mountain excursions of hiking, whitewater rafting, trail biking, rock climbing, and adventure courses, we believe we can create the best environment to allow an inbreaking of Christ’s peace and hope to those who so desperately need it.

For more information on our ministry visit our website at http://www.bridgetothemountains.org/ or find us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bridgetothemountains.

Dave Lettrich is a senior Master of Divinity student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who is also pursuing his graduate certificate in church planting through the Seminary’s Church Planting Initiative.

[1] The Rev Chris Brown (PC USA) is the former head of the Church Planting Initiative at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a founding co-pastor of the Upper Room Church Community in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The Rev Keith Kaufold (UMC) created Eighth Avenue Place in Homestead, Pa. And the Rev Jeff Eddings (PC USA) is a founding co-pastor of Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood.

Photo Credit: www.visitphilly.com

Recently 250,000 football fans gathered on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia to witness the NFL draft and boo the living daylights out of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. It’s cold comfort to Commissioner Goodell but he’s not the only one to ever divide opinions on that proud avenue.

The Parkway is home to priceless collections of art, luxury hotels, and spendy condos. Likewise, the Parkway is also home to many of Philadelphia’s most vulnerable residents—people experiencing hunger, homelessness, and poverty. Consequently, the Parkway is where many people of faith pull up in station wagons and pick-up trucks, unload soup and sandwiches, and ask people to form a line.

You can picture the battle lines: NIMBYism, shame-the-rich-ism, scaring away the museum customers, first amendment rights to religious expression – the whole shebang. The church I used to serve, Broad Street Ministry (BSM), was less than a decade old and we were trying to figure out our identity, particularly in our civic space. It started in 2005 as a church plant focused on an alternative church community. BSM seeks to be dynamic in its expression of worship, embracing those both on the margins of faith and those who have enjoyed the embrace of the church. We decided to position ourselves like this: We are not against outdoor feeding and we are in favor of indoor dining. We invited our brothers and sisters in the faith as well as our friends in the hospitality industry to come work with us at the church, serving excellent chef-prepared meals to vulnerable people indoors without having to stand in a line.

Overwhelmingly, the people who responded in the affirmative to our invitation were the big bad capitalist hoteliers and restaurateurs. They responded to our claim that hospitality is hospitality, regardless of ability to pay, and soon they were treating us like colleagues in the hospitality industry. We church and nonprofit types were becoming friends with servers, bartenders, chefs, and general managers because we had so much in common. The GM of the Four Seasons asked me to officiate his wedding to his partner of 16 years.

Incredible new possibilities for partnership emerged. Steven Cook and Mike Solomonov, the James Beard Award winning duo behind CookNSolo restaurants approached us with an idea. They ran a fried chicken and donuts chainlet called Federal Donuts that was throwing out at least 500 pounds of chicken backs and bones per week. Could they make stock out of that and provide us with chicken soup in perpetuity? We at BSM knew our identity wasn’t a soup kitchen so serving soup every day would send the wrong message, plus we had a chef who did incredible work. So together we arrived at a related idea: Let’s turn the backs and bones into soup, sell the soup to the public, and donate the proceeds to BSM.

In the three years since that conversation, we raised $180,000 via Kickstarter and a bunch more from several foundations, gone on lots of charm offensives armed with donuts and delicious Israeli food from their restaurant Zahav, and become great friends and confidantes. Oh, and the Rooster Soup Company, a classic luncheonette donating 100 percent of its proceeds to BSM’s hospitality work, opened to favorable write-ups, like this one in Bloomberg. GQ called it one of the 10 Best New Restaurants in America.

When my spouse, Karen, and I were considering whether we should move to Pittsburgh, Steven and Mike, both with roots in Pittsburgh, were instrumental in helping me picture life in a new town. Steven listened well, held my ambivalence about a new call and, of course, made restaurant recommendations. Mike even made a warm introduction to a chef in town who was hiring for his Lawrenceville restaurants in case I wanted full-time kitchen work.

When the conflict on the Parkway was fomenting, I was certain I would emerge with deeper relationships with my sisters and brothers enacting their Christian faith. Instead, two secular Jews who run some of the best restaurants in the country became lifelong friends and partners who shared a vision for caring for vulnerable people in Philadelphia and who helped me understand God’s vision for my life. Too often, our own conception of who our adversaries will be prevents us from seeing the allies, friends, and co-conspirators right in front of us.

What is the unlikely partnership you haven’t considered?

***

When in Philadelphia, consider dining at one of Steven Cook and Mike Solomonov’s restaurants: Zahav (Modern Israeli), Abe Fisher (small plates inspired by the American Jewish experience), Federal Donuts (fried chicken, donuts, and coffee), Dizengoff (hummus), Goldie (vegan falafel), and, of course, the Rooster Soup Company.

The Rev. Andy Greenhow came to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from Philadelphia, where he served as the pastor and director of faith and worship at Broad Street Ministry, a missional faith community of the PCUSA. He has also served as a chaplain on a locked psychiatric unit, as the director of young adult ministries at a large suburban church, and as a construction worker rebuilding houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Andy currently serves as the Seminary’s interim dean of students.

In the church planting program we talk about theory. The Church Planting Initiative cohort at Pittsburgh Seminary was recently discussing liturgy and the fact that it forms us. We were naming the ways people respond unexpectedly and how people handle being in community with those who are different from them. We talked a lot about the work and possibility of the church. And we came to realize that one of the most important things we do is tell church stories.

To plant a church you have to know what a church is. And a church as it works to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God can sometimes only really be known in snapshot stories—parables if you will. The upside of this is, if you spend any kind of time in a church, these parables start to find you.

As I came to this forum and to the Church Planting Initiative at Pittsburgh Seminary from a small, new church in Philadelphia—Beacon—I thought I might tell you about one such parable.

The Parable of Baptism

At the beginning of each worship service at my old church, we would pour water into the baptismal bowl and talk about what it meant to be welcomed into God’s family and how the water of baptism bore witness to the love God has for us. Every week since we started worshiping together five years ago, we would pour the water and talk about how, whether we had yet been baptized or not, the water meant we belonged to God, that God claimed us, that we belonged to each other, that we were clean and forgiven, and that God would bring us through all the water and bring us home.

Because the church welcomed people who had never been to church and people who had been hurt by the church and people who had been to church their whole lives, we explained the concept of baptism every single week. As a pastor, though, when you practice something like that, there does come a time when you wonder if anyone is still listening to your weekly best of re-runs marathon.

At Beacon there is a young woman in the congregation who is differently abled and has been there since we started. She has participated wholeheartedly in worship and worship leadership. She has loved the church and the church has loved her for as long as I have known the church and known her. Apparently, though, after five years of preacher repetition, a light bulb went on for her about baptism on one Sunday. She went right up to the baptismal bowl during passing of the peace and began to splash her fellow worshipers and declare them part of the family of God.

Perhaps the best part of the whole story is that our children’s minister—a young woman who two years ago didn’t go to church and didn’t want to, a young revolutionary who is working on a curriculum for children’s ministry, a young woman who is in seminary and who teaches the children of the church the story of Jesus with all the freshness of one on whom they have not lost their brilliance—gently tried to toe the establishment line and remind Sarah that generally pastors are the ones who do baptism.

Apparently, Sarah responded—“Yes, yes, I know! But this is what we do here!”

Indeed.

That is pretty much the clearest picture of church I’ve seen to date—church is when we get together, and a voice that people ignore everywhere else, tells us again that we are a part of God’s family. This is what we do here. Every single week.

The Rev. Karen Rohrer is director of the Church Planting Initiative at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Before joining the CPI team, Karen was co-pastor and co-founder of Beacon, a Presbyterian Church in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. The saints of Beacon taught her contextual ministry, the joy of being church, and the unique grace of being a lady pastor and boss in a neighborhood of matriarchs. The building of Beacon taught her amateur handy-woman and moisture remediation skills, and that a particular space really can be a reminder that you are loved. As director of the Church Planting Initiative, she is excited to vision new ways the church can bear good news to the world, and to support and resource the leaders God is calling forth to make it so.