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Vito and Monique are equally inviting—fitting for a couple with a band called The Welcome Wagon. In fact, hospitable strikes me as a prevailing characteristic of their lives, music, and ministry. Both raised in the same town in a farming community in Michigan, the Aiutos count their friends and parishioners as family. It's an unabashedly Midwestern frame of mind, in many ways; whereas the typical urbanite has a more transient mindset, the Aiutos have purposefully planted their lives in north Brooklyn in order to minister to that diverse community.

Monique arrived in New York City in 1992, to attend college at the prestigious Cooper Union. Two years later, after meeting again in Michigan, Vito and Monique began to deepen their acquaintance into a relationship. Vito moved to attend Princeton Theological Seminary in 1995, and the pair married three years later. In 2001, Vito began ministering with Reformed University Fellowship at New York University.

While Monique grew up in a family that went to church and prayed together, she first began to own her faith as an adult while attending Times Square Church during college. Vito, on the other hand, was an agnostic when he began college. By his junior year, he realized that the life he had constructed—one that was built around his own happiness and pleasure at the expense of those around him—was bringing him to his knees. "I can see that God's grace was such that it would not allow me to pursue my own destruction." Though he had considered prayer to be primitive or intellectually weak, he realized one day that it was his only hope—that only God could save him and order his life.

He decided to go to seminary because he felt called to study, but he says, "I don't think I realized that ministry was my vocation until after I left seminary; the calling emerged as I first worked in the church." The call to New York City as a place to raise a family and pursue ministry was also a surprise—but the Aiutos have come to love the city. "We plan on being here a long time, if the Lord wills," Vito says.

In late 2004, Vito began work on planting Resurrection Presbyterian Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Whereas his ministry experience at NYU had been mainly limited to undergraduates, who lived in the same place as students and were at roughly the same place in life, he has found that as a pastor, his experience is much more broad. "I deal with people at various stations of life: married, single, older, younger, children; baptisms, sicknesses, and weddings."

From the start, the Aiutos' inspiration for creating music has been family and home. In the early 1990s, a friend of Monique's introduced them to Dan Smith of the alt-Christian band Danielson Famile. The couple went to a Danielson concert at the legendary Knitting Factory—an experience they both term "the most incredible show I've ever been to."

"It was like he had honed in on something that was wholly his own voice, and I realized that part of the reason he could do that was because he grew up in a family with music," says Vito. "I realized I couldn't really be him, but maybe I could foster that kind of thing."

The Aiutos are well-acquainted with the rootlessness that often afflicts young New Yorkers. In contrast, they have set down roots and begun raising a family—both in their own home, and in their church. And that family is nurtured through playing music together.

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June (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53