Three years ago, Hazelwood Presbyterian Church stood in the shadows of death.

The worship had dwindled to fewer than 10 people.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette
	The Rev. Patricia Mason of Hazelwood Presbyterian Church took over the church when the congregation had dwindled to fewer than 10. Mason reached out to the community, bringing in people recovering from drug addictions and gang kids. Now the congregation has about 90 members.

The building was crumbling.

There were drug deals behind the church. A corpse was once discovered in the back lot.

Pittsburgh Presbytery was ready to cut funding for the church, once considered a jewel of black Presbyterian ministry, and pull out.

But today, as Easter is celebrated by millions around the world who mark the resurrection of Jesus, perhaps no celebration will be more heartfelt than that at Hazelwood Presbyterian.

That's because, thanks to divine providence and the Rev. Patricia Mason, a savior with red hair and polished nails, the church has undergone a resurrection of its own.

Today, 90 people are on the church rolls. Since 2001, individual giving has gone up 400 percent, to $35,000 a year. And Mason has garnered $183,000 in presbytery support for the church, now commonly referred to as Hazelwood Alive, to reflect a wide array of community programs.

The traditional Presbyterian services are quickened, Mason says, because she mixes Christian and cultural customs. Liturgical prayer is followed by a tambourine-shaking contemporary gospel hymn. There are drums in the corner and Afrocentric rap during children's time.

"We don't preach denomination here," Mason said. "We preach Christ and we preach him resurrected."

In many ways, the church's story parallels that of the woman who helped bring it back to life. Mason, 64, has known hard times. Soft-spoken but tough, she has survived poverty, two divorces and a son still struggling with drug addiction.

"I've been to the bottom, so I know how to help people get up," said Mason, who came home to Pittsburgh from Atlanta four years ago.

A Presbyterian minister without a pulpit, she preached a few sermons at Hazelwood. The congregation liked her and invited her to stay.

"If I had known how hard it would be, I never would have come," Mason joked. Nevertheless, she pleaded with the presbytery for a six-month trial. The church pays her $400 a week.

"I wanted to try," Mason said, and everything's been a miracle -- "my life, my ministry, my church."

Founded 136 years ago, the church sits on Second Avenue in Hazelwood, a city neighborhood wrestling with decay. The Presbyterians built it near the turn of the century to serve a growing community, when the nearby steel mills were booming.

It was once a congregation of well-to-do white worshippers. As the community changed, so did the faces in the church. By 1992, the church had moved into an old American Legion Hall and become mostly African American, with a diminishing congregation.

"Before Dr. Mason, the church was barely alive. People were holding on for dear life," said Jean Kennedy, who heads Pittsburgh Presbytery's social and urban projects. "Dr. Mason has focused them on spiritual renewal and reaching out into the community."

She forged partnerships with affluent Presbyterian churches that made financial contributions. She couldn't turn water into wine, but she turned overstuffed storage rooms into classrooms, all the time holding her ground against elders who resisted opening spaces up to tutoring and after-school programming.

She used no-holds-barred language, telling congregation members that some had been delivered from the "crack house to the church house." She became a street evangelist, sometimes until 10 at night, praying for people she ran into and taking services outdoors in good weather.

On the streets of Hazelwood, people smile and greet Mason as "pastor." She's the church lady who has no fear. She's gone into bars to pray for people and once bounded into a street fight, leaving the crowd shaking hands and hugging.

"I'm not afraid," said Mason, looking up toward heaven. "If I perish, I perish. This is where God has placed me."

More importantly, in a neighborhood where blacks and whites live separately, Mason fearlessly crosses the racial divide to evangelize.

"I stop people on the streets," she said. "If they are sick, I pray for them."

One white woman sought prayers for a son suffering from cancer. She testified about her son's healing at the church, which is trying to build a multiracial congregation, and she occasionally worships at the church.

Mason has extended her hand to former addicts and drug sellers. They are all in the church, as are former prison inmates and children with attention deficit disorder.

Mason's spiritual toughness was forged in her early years. She grew up in Robinson Court, a public housing development in the Hill District. She married at 17 and divorced at 23. She raised her three children as a single mother with no financial support from their father.

That was OK. Mason said she lived a good life. She was one of the first black Americans to work in the Peoples and Equitable gas companies' customer service departments. Her children had their own bedrooms. She studied psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I thought I had it all together," she said. "I was not looking for God." But in the midst of glamouring up for a night on the town in 1973, she felt a tug at her soul.

"I began to weep with the natural eye and with my heart," she said. "The Lord showed me my sin." She was 33.

In a few days, the little girl who had never been taken to church by her mother became a woman who spoke in tongues, wrapped in a whole new spirit.

From there, Mason was fast-tracked into ministry. She taught Sunday school to ministers, took classes at the Bible College and worked in street evangelism with the United Methodist Church.

In 1979, she felt called to go to Atlanta. With $50 and a borrowed car, she made her way. She was 39.

She was ordained in the Church of God in Christ in 1982 and earned master's and doctoral degrees in ministry at the Interdenominational Theological Center.

In 1990, she returned to the Presbyterian fold, which she had abandoned 17 years earlier, married a minister and practiced her ministry at a suburban Atlanta "country club" church, where she preached to entertainers and held Bible study for the wives of Atlanta Falcons football players.

In 2000, after the breakup of an abusive marriage, she came home to her family in Pittsburgh. She worked for a while as an itinerant minister, before being led to beleaguered Hazelwood.

The church was in desperate shape.

Physically, it was awash with asbestos. The ceiling leaked. The grounds were littered.

Spiritually, some of the few remaining worshippers grappled with drug and alcohol addiction. Mason found a distillery in the basement and table decorations made with beer bottles wrapped in gold foil. One family made most of the decisions, and only about five families came to worship. Mason was a one-quarter-time minister, pastoring only on Sunday.

Hazelwood itself wears the sackcloths of poverty, crime, neglect. The community is made up mostly of senior citizens or single female-headed households. Most of the families make less than $15,000 a year. At least 70 percent of the residents have no faith involvement and about 12 percent of the young people go on to college, half the national average.

To mend the breach, Mason instituted an after-school program at the church. Focusing on literacy, it uses computer training and builds life skills using Afrocentric Bible study and music for real-life lessons. About 80 young people have participated. They are fed full meals Wednesdays through Fridays.

Whenever she can, Mason takes the ministry outside. When the weather warms up, there's Friday Night Live, with Mason delivering a sermon from the front steps. With speakers, keyboard and snacks, the church holds a praise service from 6 to 8 p.m. and all are welcome.

Three years ago, Bill Arnett, of Oakland, was on his way to smoke marijuana with a friend when Friday Night Live stopped him in his tracks. A former street tough, Arnett said Mason prayed for him and he stood on the steps and "cried like a baby."

Arnett, now 62, immediately joined Hazelwood Presbyterian's Bible study and soon the church. He is now a church elder.

The Fisher's Net street ministry targets 12- to 16-year-olds. It involves a group of adults and youths who gather to pray before driving through the streets of Hazelwood. When they spot teens on the streets, they get out to talk and pray with them. The youths are invited to participate in Hazelwood Alive's literacy and theater arts ministry, and two years ago, some of them presented the Christmas program.

Mason is still looking upward. She is aiming to build a new spiritual and human services program close to the church.

It'll be another new beginning, one as bright and colorful as the 8-month-old stained glass windows that grace the church's sanctuary. They show a rainbow of people and children, saved and rejoicing around an empty cross.

"It's empty" said a beaming Mason, "because we have the victory in what Christ did on Calvary. At Hazelwood, we're focusing on the resurrection."