Outreach into community an important mission for churches, Presbyterian pastor says

A small Rostraver church just outside North Belle Vernon celebrated its connection to the community Sunday — “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Church” — and its mission to increasingly become part of its neighborhood.

“The neighborhood is a wonderful community on the edge of three communities in three different counties,” said the Rev. Mary Kay Glunt, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Belle Vernon, referring to Rostraver and North Belle Vernon in Westmoreland County, Belle Vernon in Fayette County and communities across the Monongahela River in Wasington County.

Making a reference to Latrobe’s Fred Rogers and his famous saying that it’s “a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” Glunt told about 50 people in the church and more watching on social media that “the neighborhood church is where it is happening” and those not part of the local church “are missing something amazing.”

It may take the form of providing food for families in need or, in a recent tragedy, offering the church grounds for a memorial service for 6-year-old Aria Woznick, who was killed Feb. 20 while crossing Fayette Street to get to her bus stop. The accident happened at the edge of the church’s grounds, and Glunt, whose husband, Donald, is pastor of Rehoboth Presbyterian Church in Rostraver, was the first person to place a memorial on the property that afternoon.

To increase its outreach in the community, the church set up information tables in its basement, where parishioners and visitors were encouraged to see how they could become more involved, giving what Glunt said was “tithing” their time and talents to help others, essentially 10% of their time.

“We’re not just a worship service on Sunday and close the doors. We do a lot in the community,” said Bobbi Huebner of Monessen, who previously attended a former Presbyterian church in the Rostraver village of Webster.

A group of women in the church crochet plastic grocery store bags into sleeping mats for the homeless, said Jane Bonari of Rostraver, one of about 10 crocheters of the 6-by-4 plastic mats.

They have no problem getting the grocery bags donated for their crocheting efforts, Bonari said.

“People love to know something they were going to throw away is going to help someone,” said Bonari, a retired teacher who was baptized at First Presbyterian Church of Belle Vernon.

The church is well known in the community for its chicken pies — not chicken pot pies that contain vegetables and gravy — but chicken-filled pies with gravy on the side, said Bonari, an organizer of the semi-monthly chicken pie-baking event.

It’s not food for the body, but the money raised by the sale of the chicken pies played a large role in building the church on Fayette Street in Rostraver, Huebner said.

The church was founded in 1869 in nearby Belle Vernon in Fayette County, and it retained the name, despite moving to another municipality and another county — Westmoreland — in 1959, according to church history.

At a monthly food and fellowship luncheon, donations received from those partaking of the meal are split between food pantries in Rostraver and Washington Township-Fayette City and the Presbyterian Church (USA) hunger fund, Huebner said.

Among the many mission projects is filling a shoebox with gifts during Christmastime, she said. They are distributed to needy families throughout the denomination, in the United States and abroad.

A monthly offering during Communion has supported local fire departments and the Woznick family, Huebner said.

Church challenges

The challenge of mainline Christian churches such as First Presbyterian Church is how to reverse the drop in membership and increase the number of younger families as the congregation advances in age.

Active membership in Presbyterian Church (USA), of which First Presbyterian Church of Belle Vernon is a member, fell to about 1.1 million in 2021, down about 160,000 from 2018, according to a report from the denomination’s General Assembly, which is based in Louisville, Ky. In-person attendance also took a major hit, the denomination said, as people remained reluctant to attend because of the fear of becoming infected with covid.

“Covid hit us really hard” in March 2020, said member Fred Exley. “It’s been a tough journey to recover.”

While losing active members has been a problem, it also has lost churches that parishioners could attend. There were 8,813 churches in the denomination in 2021, about 350 fewer churches than in 2018, the General Assembly reported. The communities on which some smaller churches rely have lost population, making it more difficult to maintain a church. First Presbyterian Church of Belle Vernon gained members when a Presbyterian church in Donora, across the Monongahela River in Washington County, closed, Glunt said.

Societal changes have played a role in that decline in membership, said Glunt, a native of Pittsburgh’s South Side. Decades ago, Pennsylvania had Blue Laws, initially dating to the days of William Penn, that prohibited activies such as store sales on Sunday. Organized youth sports playing games on a Sunday morning was unheard of some 60 years ago.

Then there are the demographics in communities in Fayette and Westmoreland counties, from which First Presbyterian Church draws parishioners, which make it difficult to grow because of the older population, Glunt said.

Yet Glunt does not hold the mainline churches blameless in the matter of attracting young people and young families and encouraging them to become active members, ensuring a future for the church. The church needs to learn how to bring them into the fold, she noted.

“We say we want young people and young families, yet we don’t always adjust to the young families,” Glunt said.