Category: Events, News || By

In a Downtown area that's lost many of its institutions, Bethlehem Baptist Church remains a refreshing outpost of stability.

For 119 years, the congregation has tended both to the spiritual and corporeal needs of the city.

Its newest project could be Bethlehem's biggest outreach project yet --- a community center and banquet hall Downtown that would serve both the church's 480 members and all residents of the McKeesport area.

The church is holding a golf outing this Friday at Youghiogheny Country Club, Elizabeth Township, to raise money. Tickets are on sale at the church's office on Walnut Street.

"Our next step is contacting an architect, to take what's in our hearts and put it totally down on paper," says the Rev. Earlene Coleman, Bethlehem's pastor for five years and a lifelong member of the church. "We're trying to take each step as God tells us, and we don't want to run ahead."

. . .

Community involvement is nothing new at Bethlehem, whose handsome sanctuary between Seventh and Eighth avenues has been a Downtown landmark for 24 years. ("We still think of it as 'the new church,' too," Coleman says, laughing.)

Bethlehem Baptist has a computer room where members and city residents can learn to use software packages like PowerPoint and Publisher, work on school projects or use the Internet, and until recently the church provided daycare for working parents. (When other daycare alternatives opened nearby, the church was able to discontinue the service.)

The church also has partnered with a congregation in Louisiana to collect clothing and other items for people still rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.

And two years ago, Bethlehem launched "Project Reach" with the McKeesport Area School District. Four members of the church --- two men and two women --- each mentor 15 freshmen and sophomores from McKeesport Senior High School, monitoring their grades, helping them with homework and personal problems, and making sure they attend classes.

. . .

But the community center, conceived about a year ago, is one of the church's biggest projects yet, at least in terms of capital investment.

Coleman says several people in the church perceived the need for the facility almost at the same time.

"As I said to my building committee, 'I don't know why God wants this, but he wants a community center,'" she says. "As we keep moving along, more and more people share the vision that God is spreading, and this is something he wants to do in this community."

Besides a banquet-type hall, the center that Bethlehem Baptist envisions would also incorporate daily activities for families, children and senior citizens --- needs that the church's own building can't currently serve.

"I have 80 or 90 senior citizens in the church who are still living on their own and taking care of themselves, so they don't need 'day care,' but it would be nice if they had a place to go for fellowship, rather than sitting at home, alone, watching TV," Coleman says.

The church is also working with the McKeesport YMCA to see if fitness classes or other activities could use the facility, she says.

. . .

Although Bethlehem hasn't identified a location for the center, Coleman says it would be somewhere in the Downtown area.

YMCA Executive Director Dexter Hairston is on the planning committee, along with Mayor Jim Brewster, Michele Matuch of the McKeesport Hospital Foundation, and Rob Hammond, general manager of the Daily News and an executive at its parent company, Tribune-Review Publishing.

"We have some really wonderful people working on the committee," she says. "The community has really stepped up and gotten behind it."

Coleman has a renewed perspective on her pastoral work in the city after recently returning from a missionary trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, as she works toward an advanced degree from Pittsburgh's Harty Bible School.

. . .

Previous mission trips have taken Coleman and 23 other pastors to work with churches in Guyana and Jamaica.

There are strong similarities between pastoral work in the developing world and in the United States, she says: "We don't realize that a lot of the same things we do, they also do."

Yet Coleman was inspired by the ability of pastors in extremely poor communities to maintain a positive outlook and a "level of peace and joy."

"Though I don't have much, I'm not focusing on what I don't have," she says. "Even in ministry, we are very blessed in the United States."

. . .

For information about Friday's golf outing, call the church office at (412) 664-7272. Golf tickets cost $150 each or $500 for four people, and include dinner at the clubhouse. Tickets for dinner only cost $50.

In addition, the church will host a cruise on the Gateway Clipper on July 13 to raise money for the community center. Tickets are $51 per person and include dinner and oldies spun by a DJ. Call the church for reservations.