The classic approach is something like this: graduate from seminary, find a church that will hire you, get ordained, start paying off those student loans.

Then there’s the “let-it-percolate” approach that Mike Gehrling and Chris Brown are trying.

Both graduated in May 2008 from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Feeling a pull towards new church development, the two started walking through city neighborhoods and praying together to try to discern what God might have in mind for them.

They both found part-time jobs — Gehrling with a parachurch college ministry and Brown at a local café — to help cover the bills and make connections in the community. And they were ordained by Pittsburgh Presbytery to try to start a new, multi-cultural congregation called the Upper Room, focusing on young adults. It’s anything but a sure shot and not without some hesitancy, either, in part because there’s already an established Presbyterian church in the same neighborhood.

But it’s an example of what can happen when seminary students and a presbytery both are willing to take some chances, to think creatively together about what could be.

While at seminary, Brown, who’s 25 and married, said he realized that he didn’t have any non-Christian friends; he was totally immersed in the work of the church.

But working as a barista, he’s found most of his co-workers are what he calls “de-churched” — people who’ve had some contact with churches growing up but have stepped away. One told him that “I was a Christian once, but my boyfriend broke up with me because he said Jesus told him to, and I haven’t been back to church since.” Brown said: “I hear a lot of the negative experiences people have had with church in the past and the ways they’ve been burned by the church. It helps when I explain we’re trying to do church a different way and in a different context.”

This ministry also is an example of the kind of approach some leaders in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) want the denomination to encourage. They describe a mismatch between the desires of those graduating from seminary to work in urban areas and the needs of smaller congregations in rural areas and small towns for pastoral leadership. 

One response to that might be for more seminary graduates to consider tent-making — to find other work to pay the bills, and to pursue ministry in a setting in which a congregation might not be able to afford a full-time pastor, or in which there are needs for ministry not being met. Both Gehrling and Brown are being paid half the presbytery minimum for pastors for their part-time work, and their congregation is meeting in rented space so there is no building to construct or maintain. An endowment fund from an established church is paying their medical insurance premiums.

For Pittsburgh Presbytery, what Brown and Gehrling were proposing does not fit neatly into a classical new-church development model. But Vera White, who leads new church development efforts for the presbytery, said its New Church Development Commission was willing to take a chance on them for a number of reasons.

They had a track record.  White had experience as an intern with another new church development in Pittsburgh, The Open Door congregation. 

And Gehrling had served as a student assistant pastor for the English-speaking service at a Korean congregation. The main worship service at that church is in Korean, but “the young adults and the youth often are not real fluent in Korean and prefer to worship in English,” White said. “The two services are divided not just by language, but by generation.”

Under Gehrling’s leadership, the English service grew from about 20 to closer to 60, including not only the children of parents active in that congregation, but also students from Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Gehrling arranged for transportation for those students to worship, White said. And they started bringing friends, some of whom weren’t Korean, which resulted in a growing, increasingly multicultural community. Gehrling’s “a good old suburban kid,” White said, who “ended up growing a real passion for multicultural ministry.”

White also picked up signals that Brown and Gehrling’s gifts for church planting were being recognized and encouraged by others.

“A couple of our seminary professors said to me in separate conversations ‘These two are among our very best students,’ ” she recounted. “We’re not talking about people who you might say couldn’t find a job somewhere else, so tried to find a way around the system. We’re talking about really gifted, high-potential young candidates.”

They laid the groundwork. In the fall of their last year in seminary, Brown and Gehrling began to sense a pull towards new church development. They met together and prayed — about whether God was calling them into church planting and about whether they should do it together.  They began walking through neighborhoods, praying for those people and the community’s needs.

“We had an e-mail list of 100 people that we were sending out prayer updates and prayer requests to every two weeks,” Brown said. “This is something that had a lot of prayer from the very beginning.”

They initially considered setting up a church in Lawrenceville, a neighborhood northeast of downtown where art galleries and restaurants are opening up and young people moving in. “We went there and prayed there; something intuitively just did not feel right to us,” Gehrling said. So they started praying in Squirrel Hill, an affluent neighborhood near both Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, with a sizeable Jewish population.

After a time, convinced this was the right place to be, they both moved in to the neighborhood and took jobs, hoping to build connections, with Gehrling working with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon and Brown at a café.

There were some concerns: the Presbyterian church that’s already in Squirrel Hill is well-established, and is “doing a great job of reaching families, of reaching established professionals,” and of building good relationships with its Jewish neighbors, White said. Some were concerned that planting a new church in that heavily Jewish neighborhood might be perceived as a too-aggressive attempt at evangelism.

But Brown and Gehrling wanted to work more with students, young adults, and new immigrants, and “they had a vision that was very different from anything we had ever tried before,” White said. “They never see themselves as owning a piece of property or a building,” he adds.

For the first few months, starting in the fall of 2008, the community gathered for Bible study and discussion, building slowly through personal connections, and then started meeting for worship on Sunday nights in Brown’s living room. On Palm Sunday, the community moved for worship to rented space at Phipps Conservatory, usually drawing in about 20 people.

When Brown and Gehrling presented their proposal, “We thought, ‘This is not a huge financial risk for the presbytery,’ ” White said. “It is a risk as far as trying something that’s never been tried before around here. But it wasn’t like we were putting in a quarter-of-a-million dollars over five years,” as happens with some NCDs. Instead, the initial grant was just $13,000.

“We felt it was worth the risk of trying to reach a population that is noticeably tough to reach,” White explained. “We thought this was a way of trying something new and we shouldn’t pass that up.”

They grew from culture of creativity. Both Pittsburgh seminary and the presbytery are becoming places that, intentionally, are trying to encourage creativity in ministry. The presbytery has backed a number of new church developments, including Vietnamese and African fellowships, and Hot Metal Bridge and The Open Door, each distinct, each with its own vision for ministry; each creating an awareness that new and innovative approaches were possible.

The seminary has “cultivated here a missional climate that allows for students to really challenge, to think in new ways missionally about how the church needs to reach out,” said Don Dawson, chair of the presbytery’s New Church Development Commission and director of the seminary’s World Mission Initiative. “There’s a creativity, there’s a desire to take initiative, to start something new.”

And the Upper Room is trying to encourage a flattened style of leadership, with the community supporting the efforts of one woman, for example, who is tutoring an Iraqi family and of a young man who’s interested in working with the homeless.

They’ve been talking about “how to communicate the gospel in a post-Christendom culture,” in specific places, in neighborhoods with a particular demographic, Brown said.

Some of what they’ve learned so far?

“Presbyteries have to take risks,” Dawson said. “They can’t be sitting back and looking for the sure thing.”

Gehrling, 26, said he’d tell seminary students, “Don’t be afraid to push forward a little bit.” Some say they feel like Jonah, “waiting for God to hit them over the head and say, ‘You’re going to do this.’ Sometimes I think we need to go forward and let God say, `Stop.’ Let God close the doors,” if that’s the wrong way to go.

As for the presbytery, “our New Church Development Commission would say … part of our sense of strategy and calling is to experiment with new ways of being the church,” White said. “We see that in the long run as having a huge impact on the whole church. I like to say it’s almost like the research and development department of ministry, where we get to do some experimentation, to try some things. And hopefully some of the things we learn will have an impact on the existing churches” as well.

When they were doing prayer walks through neighborhoods, Gehrling and Brown prayed for the people they saw on the street, the businesses they passed. They learned about the diversity of Squirrel Hill the day they heard conversations in five different languages. They listened for the pull of the Holy Spirit.

And when they came to a stop light, “we always just followed the green lights,” Brown said. “That sort of became a metaphor for how the process here worked. There were constant green lights from the presbytery. We just followed the green lights.”

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