Eastminster Church has been in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood since 1856, and for most of that history it worshiped and looked like a fairly typical Presbyterian congregation. Aaron Teter, the church’s current pastor, spent time recently reading through the session’s meeting minutes going back to the 1960s. In the 1970s, as the neighborhood changed and members left, the session wrote down a plain conviction: this was a church for the neighborhood. By the early 2000s, a strategic plan named becoming cross-cultural as an explicit goal, and the pastors and staff hired in the years since, including Rev. Nicole Porter, carried that work into the life of the congregation. Today Eastminster is diverse racially, economically, and in the traditions its members bring with them, with that diversity reflected at every level of leadership, from elders and deacons to the pulpit.
In this episode, Aaron and Ayana Teter talk with hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm about how that history shaped the congregation, and about the practices that carry it now: reading a church’s own story back to it, passing the peace before communion, and a kind of leadership built on dependence rather than control. Ayana, Dean of Community Life and Formation at Pittsburgh Seminary and a leader within Eastminster, talks about watching people who aren’t fully reconciled in their private lives cross the room to greet one another before receiving the elements.
