MARS — Dutilh United Methodist Church, being located at both 1270 Dutilh Road in Cranberry Township and 525 Pittsburgh St. in Mars, has the motto “One church, two locations.”

But the Mars campus, which has been closed since May, is reopening this month with a new name, a new look and a new church experience.

The former Mars United Methodist Church building is now the New Day campus and will reopen Saturday with a new type of service, said Matt McCarrier, the Dutilh youth ministries director and New Day’s pastor. “We took the pews out. We put in a whole new floor and leveled it,” said McCarrier of the work done on weekends by church volunteers since the final Mother’s Day service at the church.

“We redid the chancel area and added a coffee bar and reworked the handicapped accessible ramps. We put in new hardwood flooring and got new tables and chairs,” said McCarrier.

“We had a company redo the floor and rebuild the chancel,” said McCarrier. “Everything other than that has been done by volunteers from the congregation, 10 to 20 people every weekend, painting, cleaning, putting in cabinets.”

Joe McCosby of Forward Township, who coordinated the volunteers with Bob Kist, said congregation members did the bulk of the work, “plumbing and all that stuff.”

“Everybody’s busy, that’s a fact of modern society,” said McCosby when asked if it was difficult rounding up workers for the project. “But I really wouldn’t say it was hard.

“When you have a passion in your heart and you are preparing a house of the Lord to save souls and help people find faith and hope, the work’s not hard.”

The new look — tables and chairs replacing pews — mirrors the nontraditional church experience planned for New Day.

“The idea is we want it to really feel like a family room or a living room,” said McCarrier.

“People were becoming disenchanted with worship services. They don’t want to just sit in a pew and watch. They want to be more involved,” said McCarrier.

This new service, he said, is really a return to an old form of worship.

“The early church was started in homes. They would meet together for meals. We want to go back to the basics,” McCarrier said.

The services will be at 5 p.m. on Saturdays, he said. Worshippers will sit at tables.

“We are going to name a table leader. They will lead the table in prayer and praises,” McCarrier said. “And they will have time to pray among the table.”

For Communion, the juice and the bread will be passed among the tables, McCarrier said.

Levon Hudson, Dutilh worship leader, said, “My part of the service will be the music. Basically, I will lead the congregation in singing contemporary praise songs. We will have a band, drums and guitars. It will be a worship band.”

Instead of a sermon, McCarrier will deliver what he calls a teaching prompt.

“For 10 or 15 minutes, I am introducing a topic. It will be very, very Biblical based, but at the same time we want it to be culturally relevant,” he said. “We are going to tie what the Bible says to everyday life.”

Then the tables will have a 20- to 30-minute discussion of the topic led by the table leader.

“At the end, we will have announcements, and people will be able to grab a coffee and hang out,” he said.

People will be able to come and go from the service as they please, said McCarrier.

McCarrier said this type of service is for any age group and for anyone unsatisfied with traditional church services.

“It is very, very family friendly. We will have children’s programs and a nursery available,” he said.

“A lot of the basic overall structure is what I did with teens as youth pastor. It was very successful,” McCarrier said. “They wanted to talk, not be preached at.”

McCarrier said, “New Day is a new beginning. The new start and redesign is what we wanted to do based on Dutilh’s vision and direction of where they wanted the church to go and how they wanted to use this campus.”

Dutilh’s senior pastor Dwayne Burfield said, “I am very excited for what Matt McCarrier is going to be doing in the Mars area with this new format for worship. And I also want to say Dutilh United Methodist sees this as another opportunity to reach people who are searching for Christ and what it means to live a Christian life.”

“I will be here for the first couple of months to help mentor Matt through the process,” Burfield said.

Burfield, who has been senior pastor for four years, said New Day’s take on worship “will give Dutilh United Methodist five different venues of worship.”

Dutilh, which has about 1,000 members and averages 500 to 600 in attendance on weekend services at its Cranberry Township location, has traditional, contemporary and blended services on Sunday, as well as a service online, said Burfield.

New Day adds another option, Burfield said.

“For the Saturday services, we want to keep it intentionally small, about 50 to 60 people,” said McCarrier. “And when we grow bigger than that, we want to start another service at a different day or time.”

McCarrier said in the future the church hopes to renovate the building’s basement to make it more suitable for the church afterschool program that meets there and add more handicapped restrooms and stairwells.

“My first two teaching prompts will be ‘A New Day, a New Direction,’” said McCarrier. “God calls on us to take these steps, even though it can be scary, we have to trust.”