The first time the Rev. Kelly Chatman stepped into the pulpit at Redeemer Lutheran Church 17 years ago, he looked out at his new congregation -- 30, maybe 35 people at the most -- and got a sinking feeling in his stomach.
"I wondered if I had made a mistake," he said recently.
After 25 years spent mostly in education and church administration, Chatman had decided to try his hand at being a local church pastor. He had walked away from a prestigious and comfortable position as the director of youth ministries in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Chicago headquarters to take over a struggling church in a distressed neighborhood in Minneapolis.
Many years earlier, he had served briefly as an associate pastor in Oregon, but this time he was heading his own church. And it was not an auspicious beginning. On his way into the building that morning, he couldn't pretend that he hadn't seen the drug dealers doing business on the corner across the street.
"I said to myself, 'What am I doing here at this stage of my career?'" he said. "I wasn't even sure how long they would be able to keep paying my salary."
Soon, Chatman changed his perspective.
"I decided that the congregation wasn't the 35 people sitting in the pews," he said. "The congregation was the 4,000 people who lived in the neighborhood. Once I reframed it like that, it helped me see that the church needed to be a physical presence on the street."