In 1995 Brian and Ruth Hamilton – she the associate pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Detroit and he of another – began looking for a church where they could share a pastorship. He’d grown up on the east coast some 20 miles from the Canadian border and hoped to return to the East. She’d been raised in Arkansas and hoped for somewhere where the weather was a bit less brutal than in Brian’s first hometown.

They concentrated their search in the area running from Boston in the north to Washington in the south. They ended up about as far south as possible, just a mile from the Potomac that marks Washington’s border with Virginia.

The Westminster Presbyterian Church on I Street SW was then searching for a new pastor. It was, and is, a progressive congregation – what Brian now refers to as “a risk-taking church.” It had begun as a mission parish of a downtown Presbyterian church that had wanted to reach out to the burgeoning population of the Southwest. That was 1853, and they established a church on Seventh Street where the Department of Transportation would later occupy a modern office building.

When Southwest underwent the urban-renewal inspired razing and development in the 1950s and ‘60s, the church gained a new building, the modern concrete and glass structure it now calls home at 400 I St. As the population changed, so did the congregation. But true to the nature of the neighborhood, the parishioners remained a mixture of highly educated professionals, artistically inclined residents and many trapped in a lower income cycle.

“Risk taking” went so far as to lead Westminster to choose the first woman member of the National Capital Presbytery to serve as their pastor in 1979.

Before the Hamiltons’ arrival, Westminster had developed something of a reputation as a gay church. In 1983 it had become the first church in the 110-church Presbytery to openly minister to the gay and lesbian community and to operate a program to deliver meals to persons with AIDS.

Westminster wasn’t actually looking for co-pastors; the search was on for just a pastor. But the Hamiltons offered the church quite a deal in that they would jointly occupy a single full-time position, but their commitment to their church and its community requires more than a combined 40 hours a week – by a factor of at least two.

Under their leadership, the church has broadened its focus throughout the community and is no longer thought of as a “gay church.” Ruth points out that the church needed to minister to the spiritual needs of parishioners – gay and straight – as fully human beings, not just people defined by sexual identity. Indeed, Westminster is probably much better known now as a “jazz church.”

A jazz church? Yes. Every Friday evening from 6-9 p.m. the hall of the sanctuary resounds to the sounds of jazz before a crowd often counted in the hundreds – at $5 a person. The Hamiltons started Jazz Night nine years ago as a way of reaching out to the wider community and, as Brian says, helping people put their faith into action by fostering and hosting the “good works” of everyone. Besides, he adds, “Jazz transcends the black/white barrier in a way little else can,” which he sees as a key to reaching throughout the community served by their “community church.”

But it isn’t just jazz that the Hamiltons have used in their outreach. The Jazz Nights offer food in the basement, which is prepared by a catering operation under the auspices of the Southwest Renaissance Development Corporation, a nonprofit corporation which Westminster established with two goals: “to help people meet their economic needs and to help people express and celebrate their worth as creatures of God through the arts.”

The Friday Jazz Nights have also spawned a newer effort – Blue Monday Blues. Like its Friday evening inspiration, the Monday evening version offers three hours (5:30 to 8:30 in this case) of live music on the main level and food and beverages in the basement. Admission here is also $5.

As the fame of “The Jazz Church” has spread, Brian and Ruth find they do more weddings and funerals at the request of people who know the church for its musical outreach to the community than by those who know it simply for worship services. “In technical terms, that might be called ‘soft evangelism,’” says Ruth, “but it is the way we become an organization that focuses on the fully human in all of us.”