Location: Brookline Section, Pittsburgh Pa.

Presbytery: Alleghenies

Membership: 65 communicant, 39 baptized

Organized: 1998.

Pastor: Rut Etheridge, ordained and installed June 2006. C.J. Williams was organizing Pastor and remains on session as a ruling elder. Other ruling elders are Jim McFarland and Jay Strunk.

We are quite a diverse group chronologically, ethnically, and socially. Members range in age from 80’s to newborns,, represent many ethnicities within the U.S. and also birthplaces of Germany, France, Belarus, Egypt and other parts of the world. While predominantly a blue-collar crowd, some of us have white collar jobs and some of us are self-professed rednecks.

The Lord’s Day worship is the heart and soul of the church family, and the session is grateful for a flock who truly loves to worship together and who truly loves one another. Lord’s Day morning worship is followed each week by a fellowship luncheon, which continues to be a blessed means of refreshment and fellowship. We observe the sacrament of the Lord’s supper once per month during a 1 p.m. worship service. On other Lord’s Days, we have Sabbath school classes for all ages, currently focusing on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. We also use our 1pm time slot for missionary presentations, psalm sings, and prayer.

Beyond Lord’s Days, the church family enjoys other outlets for ministry and fellowship. There is a Wednesday evening Bible study, a biweekly ladies’ Bible study, a monthly “Dinner and Doctrine” Bible study geared toward college and seminary students. We are looking to establish a men’s discipleship group to augment one-on-one discipleship. We have an annual vacation Bible school in the summer. We continue to reach out to the Brookline community, but it has proven be “hard soil” as it is steeped in Roman Catholicism. Through the year, we have several gatherings for fellowship, the favorite being an annual hayride/cookout in the fall. The “Providence Pistol League” meets monthly at a local indoor range and then folks head to dinner together afterward.

Fun Facts:

° Our church family is full of children!

° The vast majority of the church is made up of first-generation Reformed Presbyterians.

° Before purchasing its current building in 2001, the church worshiped in a hotel room and, upgraded afterward to a funeral home (we moved caskets around before and after worship, and kept the kids out of the room that sometimes had a body in it). We also worshipped in a banquet hall sporting a huge wall mural of the chariot race from Ben-Hur.

Prayer Requests

° Pray for our outreach efforts in the community. Door to door work, setting up a tent to advertise the church on community day, and other efforts. have thus far not yielded many neighborhood visitors. Consistent witness in the neighborhood is also difficult because most church members do not live there.

° As God has blessed us with numeric growth, please pray that above all we would continue to grow spiritually. Please pray for wisdom as we have the blessed “problem” of a growing congregation housed each week in a building with limited facilities and parking.

° Pray for those in the congregation seeking employment. Pray for those whose convictions regarding the 4th commandment have led to complications in their work-places.