A Congregation in Skinny Jeans

ONE recent Sunday night on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a crowd of more than 100 men and women in their 20s and early 30s gathered.

True to the unspoken dress code of the neighborhood, they were wearing high-waisted skinny jeans, vintage T-shirts and deliberately homely sweaters. One woman in a floral romper, her platinum-blond hair cut in a shag, carried a Bob Seger vinyl record under her arm. After a gospel band played, the group listened as a man with a tattoo and a shaved head, Thomas Vito Aiuto, gave a talk that referred in turn to Woody Allen, jogging and London cabdrivers.

They were at church.

Resurrection Presbyterian Church and Mr. Aiuto (known as Vito), its pastor, have developed a reputation for attracting the artistic young denizens of the neighborhood to services that combine readings of Psalm 85 with sermons that have a somewhat secular inflection.

Mr. Aiuto, 39, bristles when his church is singled out as particularly cool. “I don't want this church to be special,” he said over chicken mole at a Williamsburg taqueria. “I don't want us to be a church for artists. I want it to be a garden-variety church. What we have to offer people is God.” He paused for a moment. “And I think our music is really good.”

While only one-quarter of the so-called millennial generation, those born after 1980, attend weekly religious services (according to a study by the Pew Research Center), young pastors like Mr. Aiuto and Jay Bakker, the son of the televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye, as well as groups like the Buddhist-inspired Dharma Punx, are tailoring their messages to young worshipers.

In Mr. Aiuto's case, this can involve a certain irreverence (he made a rude gesture while illustrating a point about the parable of the prodigal son during a theological question-and-answer session after one recent service) and a dash of self-deprecation.

“I'm shocked I'm a preacher,” he said. “There's a part of me that did and in some ways still feels that I have no place standing up and telling other people what to do or to believe.”

Mr. Aiuto grew up in Tecumseh, a farm town in Michigan. His family attended a Presbyterian church occasionally but religion “wasn't really important,” he said. “It was never talked about at home. It wasn't something we ever did.” He attended Western Michigan University and decided after taking a few freshman philosophy courses that he was an agnostic.

He described himself as a “garden-variety fraternity guy” who experienced a spiritual conversion at age 20, when he had an anxiety attack after taking too many caffeine pills washed down with beer during exam time.

“I felt like I was going to die,” Mr. Aiuto said. “I felt like I was plunging into this black hole, and I said: ‘Dear God, if you're real, please make this stop. I guess I'll change my life, and I don't know what it'll mean, but you have to help me.' ”

Nothing happened, and he left his exams and retreated home. “I had perceived my life as an amusement park ride: I'm going to do the most drugs and be with the most people and do the most extravagant things and pretending I'm Jack Kerouac, and nobody's experienced this like I have,” Mr. Aiuto said. “I kept thinking, ‘You got to a place where you were so desperate you knew that if there's a God, only God could help you,' and the dominoes fell pretty quickly after that.”

He managed to graduate, then enrolled at Princeton Theological Seminary. He next worked at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and as a minister to college students at New York University. Six years ago, the Presbytery, a conglomeration of Presbyterian churches, approached him about starting a church in Williamsburg.

“Part of it was probably the cachet of Williamsburg, and probably my own gifts and how I fit into this neighborhood,” said Mr. Aiuto, who lives on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.