THE STORY OF ST. ANDREW’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH begins early in the year 1837, when a small group of men and women of Trinity Church (now Trinity Cathedral) met together with their Rector to plan the founding of a second Episcopal Church in the City of Pittsburgh. The congregation first gathered to worship on Easter Sunday, 1837, in a school room in the West Ward and subsequently worshipped for a year and a half in the “Penn Street Concert Hall.”
The first St. Andrew’s Church building, made of brick, was built in 1839-1840 at the present location of Fort Duquesne Boulevard and Ninth Street (about where Pittsburgh CAPA, the High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, now stands). Frequent flooding, however, caused extensive damage, and a second St. Andrew’s Church building was constructed of stone at the same location in 1870.
Changing urban residential patterns at the turn of the 20th Century inspired leaders of St. Andrew’s to the dramatic decision to relocate from their downtown location to the growing East End. The present St. Andrew’s Church building was first used for worship on Easter Sunday, 1906. Settled at the corner of Hampton Street and North Euclid Avenue in the lovely Highland Park neighborhood, now a national Historic District, St. Andrew’s is a fine example of the Gothic Revival movement in American architecture. It offers many exterior and interior points of special interest, including a carved stone reredos and an ornate Lady Chapel—and with several collections of fine stained glass windows, including a signed L.C. Tiffany window, Christ and the Children, over the High Altar, and two majestic windows in the transepts, Nativity and Ascension, by the renowned artist and illustrator Clara Miller Burd. In 1913 an E.M. Skinner pipe organ was built for St. Andrew’s. Restored and expanded in 1992, this organ remains one of the finest instruments in the region.
St. Andrew’s is today, in the first decade of the 21st Century, a bustling congregation of some 250 households from Highland Park, our surrounding East End and suburban neighborhoods and communities—and, indeed, from all parts of the wider metropolitan area. In the rich tradition of our Anglican heritage we seek to worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness, with a deep sense of hospitality, an appreciation of our differences and diversities, and an affectionate atmosphere of gracious good humor and mutual respect. We live together with an enthusiasm for intellectual inquiry and the spiritual journey for all ages, for ministries of compassion and Christian witness both locally and in the wider world, for music and all the creative arts, and for the nurturing of individuals and families through traditional worship, sacrament, and relationships of care.
St. Andrew’s is truly a neighborhood center, a “village church,” an essential part of the fabric of our community. We are privileged to welcome and sponsor concerts and educational and civic programs and to be the Highland Park home for many community groups and activities, including the Pittsburgh Camerata, the Tuesday Musical Club, the Urban Sky Consort, the East End Male Gospel Chorus, the Highland Park Community Council and Community Development Corporation, the International Institute of Arts and Languages, the St. Andrew’s Stroke Group, Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council Tutoring, Tai Chi, Moms’ Morning Out, and regular weekly meetings of New Horizons Narcotics Anonymous, Overcomers Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous.
The people of St. Andrew’s are deeply committed to compassionate Christian Outreach. Our Five Talents Prayer Circle supports spiritual and economic development among the poor of Peru, and in the nearer East End Pittsburgh neighborhoods we support Youth Outreach at St. Stephen’s Church, Wilkinsburg, Seeds of Hope Ministry, Bloomfield/Garfield, and the Sanctuary of Praise in Homewood. We are active participants in the East End Cooperative Ministry, with volunteers regularly preparing and serving meals at the Men’s Shelter, delivering Meals-on-Wheels, and participating with ExtraOrdinary Tutoring. We work with the Union Project, an arts-based community center, and we field monthly teams for “Off the Floor,” a ministry providing essential household furnishings to the poorest of our neighbors. The list goes on and on.
At many of our Sunday morning services at St. Andrew’s we conclude by praying together in the words of what is sometimes called the “Prayer of St. Francis.” In this brief offering, we pray in a time of much distress in the wide world and even in the wider Church that we will be equipped both as individuals and as a community to live lives truly shaped by the Gospel of Christ:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.