The River Community Church has a new location but the same emphasis on community.

The River moved to 273 Chester Drive in Lower Burrell from New Kensington as part of a merger with the Church of God in Lower Burrell. The River had been located at 200 Freeport Road for the past 18 years.

In its new digs, the church will go by “The River 15068,” referring the the ZIP code that covers New Kensington, Arnold, Lower Burrell, and parts of several surrounding communities.

“One of the things that we have had to navigate is being The River New Kensington, we strongly identified as a ‘New Kensington Church for New Kensington.’ And that was part of our ethos, part of our energy, part of who we were,” Pastor Dean Ward said.

“We are celebrating the opportunity to connect with all of 15068 in a more meaningful, significant way.”

A grand opening is set for Sept. 15.

The transition

The former Church of God in Lower Burrell and The River “are part of the same network of churches,” Ward said. He said there are about 65 congregations in Western Pennsylvania that are under the umbrella of the Church of God.

The River started 20 years ago at the Penn State New Kensington campus in Upper Burrell.

“That worked really well for us. However, it was not in a community,” Ward said. “It was detached from New Kensington by about 4 miles out in the country.”

Through a series of events and conversations, The River began leasing the building at 200 Freeport Road — an old Alcoa building — in December 2006, Ward said.

“(We) had 18 great years in that property in the heart of New Kensington — serving, blessing, helping, giving back to our community.”

The Church of God began in 1906 in Arnold and met in New Kensington at one point. It also had property on Woodmont Avenue, Ward said. In the 1950s, church leaders bought a parcel on Chester Drive in Lower Burrell and moved to that location in the 1960s.

“They had a great 55-year run here,” Ward said.

Over the years, the congregation at the Church of God began to dwindle — it had about 25 to 30 members, Ward said — and The River was mulling a new location. That’s what led to the merger.

In June 2023, the Church of God congregation and The River officials voted to approve a merger, Ward said. Sept. 10 was the last worship service the Church of God had at its location as a church, and the two bodies began worshipping together in New Kensington the following Sunday.

That process was months of “what-ifs,” said Cyndie Massarelli, a Church of God congregant who now serves on The River 15068 church council.

“It was God’s hand working that we were losing membership and The River was looking for a home,” she said.

In the meantime, the Chester Drive church was being renovated.

“We touched just about every square-inch of the building,” Ward said.

The River used a third-party design team, Mississippi-based Taste & See Consulting + Design, to do the renovations. Renovators opened up the church’s assembly room to showcase its wooden ceiling. Other upgrades included fresh paint and flooring. There were no structural changes.

“We wanted it to be clean, simple and compelling,” Ward said. “We wanted to create an irresistible place that people would be very comfortable in.”

The merging process “went much smoother than anticipated,” Ward said. The Church of God’s congregants were accustomed to a more traditional style of worship and The River is more modern and contemporary.

“The key for the transition was the relationships,” Ward said. “They are dear, dear people. And in the short year that we’ve been together, we have formed some very deep friendships. And they seem to have been willing to sacrifice some of their style of worship to be part of a church that is thriving, growing and committed to reaching the community.”

The last service at the Freeport Road location was Aug. 11.

Soft openings

A soft opening at Chester Drive was held Aug. 18. That told the history of the church.

Through renovations, Ward and his team found many pulpits used over the years, one from a Slovakian congregation that met in the basement of the Woodmont Avenue and Chester Drive churches while the English-speaking congregation met upstairs.

The River hosts two services on Sunday mornings, one at 9 and the other at 10:30, Ward said The River aims for a one-hour service but, with the guest speakers the first day, the service went about 20 minutes longer, leading to some parking difficulties in the neighborhood with people coming for the later service.

That has been addressed with 9 a.m. churchgoers parking in a grass lot on the same parcel of the church, Ward said.

“I was floored the first Sunday we had there,” Massarelli said. “I just could not believe all the people, and everybody was greeting each other. There was a sense of, ‘We did it.’”

Ward said the church is open to everyone.

“I often say we are a church for people who have given up on church, a church for people who aren’t interested in church, that we have a real heart to be a safe place far from God to hear the best message ever offered,” he said.

He said The River celebrates its diversity. There are about 200 congregants of different backgrounds and beliefs.

“‘There’s a lot of reasons a lot of people don’t go to church, and we know how much it takes for somebody to get up on a Sunday morning and come into a service,” Ward said. “We want them to know that hour on Sunday morning can make a profound, positive difference in their life.”

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