Mike Khandjian

Khandjian, 42, the senior pastor at the Old Cutler Presbyterian Church, 14401 Old Cutler Road, was serving as pastor at Tallahassee's Wildwood Presbyterian Church, a post he had held for 10 years, when he decided to accept the Miami-Dade position.

"They called and said, 'we need a pastor and someone has put your name in the hat,'" Khandjian recalled. "I told them that we couldn't come, that our church was growing, we were building, it was a very young church."

But, Miami was home to the affable young priest and he relented, allowed his name to be considered in a process that took two years and, in the end, he decided that the 35-year-old Old Cutler Presbyterian, with its 1,400 members and sprawling grounds, was where God wanted him to be. He accepted the senior pastor's post and, with wife Katherine and children, Kevin, 15, Emily, 10, and Erin, 7, returned in June, 1996 to the place where he found his calling.

Khandjian grew up in Miami-Dade, attending Crestview Elementary in North Miami and then Coral Reef Elementary in South Miami-Dade. He went on to Palmetto Junior High and graduated Westminster High School in 1975. He began working for Eastern Airlines as a computer operator and enrolled at Miami-Dade Community College for two years.

"I went to Miami-Dade, joined this church at about the same time and worked at Eastern Airlines," he said. "I got involved here, started teaching a class, working with the children. At some point I really felt I belonged to the ministry; I had a good relationship with people here and I felt like God was calling me, that my calling was really to work with people."

Khandjian decided to enter the ministry and moved to Jackson, Mississippi to attend Belhaven College and then the Reform Theological Seminary, also in Jackson. Upon graduation, he came back to Old Cutler Presbyterian and served as the church's youth guide for three years, before making the move to Tallahassee to head up his own church.

Since his return to South Florida, Khandjian has moved to start new churches in the community.

"I believe that a lot of the churches historically have existed unto themselves and have been very unconnected," he said.

"We're not here to be big -- we are a large congregation -- so I am very committed to starting new churches. We've started a church in the Little Havana area, we're about to start another church in Country Walk, we have a church without walls downtown and each week we go and minister to 150 people that are homeless."

Khandjian says his church is committed to a message that is true, not only in word but in deed.

"We teach that the gospel doesn't work if it's just words; it's got to be words and deeds," he said. "So, we have developed a ministry of mercy, which looks not only at the needs of the congregation, but the community and responds to that. We're very involved with Habitat for Humanity, we've become involved with other churches in this.

"We have the habitat ministry, ministry to the homeless, an AA group meets here, an anger group, a cancer support group, we were ministering to some people that got involved in some deviant lifestyles. If we believe that the message is true there has to be more than words."