Christ is Risen!
Welcome to the Holy Ascension Building Project Newsletter!
Back in 2020, it started to become clear that our small parish’s space problem was not merely the result of trying, and failing, to stand six feet apart. Rather, like many Orthodox churches, we have been experiencing unprecedented growth. While this has been a great blessing, it has far out-paced our building’s ability to accommodate it. Additionally, our 110 year-old building faces structural, safety, parking, and accessibility issues, which are not solvable by any kind of addition or remodeling band-aid.
Fast-forward to today. By the Grace of God, our parish now owns a beautiful ten acre wooded lot about a mile and a half from our current location. The building that came with the property has since been transformed into our parish hall, and it has already been remodeled for our needs: classrooms, an office, etc. We have also been preparing the property for our future church building by adding parking, a cemetery, a garage/workshop, etc. The approved beautiful architectural plans for our new church building are now ready and await enough funding to become a reality.
Since many people inside and outside of our parish are now invested in this project, I would like to publish regular financial and construction updates. Additionally, I am frequently asked how the whole process unfolded that got us this far along, so I would like to capture some of those highlights in writing as well. So, God-willing, this is the first post of many more to come that will cover those two topics. So … here we go!
Current Status:
Since we began our fund-raising efforts in earnest last fall, we have collected over six-hundred thousand dollars toward the building project, and have pledges for about that much over the next two years. We are also exploring the possibility of a building loan.
As for building it, we have only found one construction company that wanted to bid on the project so far: Jones Construction out of Spring Arbor. They have the project estimated at 5.5 million on an 18 month building timeline. (This does not include the finer details such as iconography.)
I’m hoping that we might still be able to find more competitive bids, but have had little success so far. Meanwhile we are working on projects that will reduce the cost if we do them ourselves in advance, such as the parking and drainage issues we have been working on.
Since we are not yet close to having what we need, breaking ground is not imminent. Please pray along with me that God sends us enough benefactors such that we could break ground next year.
Building Project Narrative.
I wrote a short Building Project History page on our website a few years ago, which is linked from our main Building Project page, so that anyone looking at our project could get some context. But there is much more to that story that I would like to tell. If you had asked me ten years ago if I would ever try to design and build a new church, I would have laughed. It took me a while to come around, but the trepidation I had slowly gave way, not only because of practical need. Rather, the planning I was dreading gradually started to help me understand the way that beauty points to God, which shook me in a way I didn’t know was possible. The whole process of working through the readings and designs with other parishioners, and then with our architect, became one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. I am now awed and overwhelmed by the prospect of building this living monument to God.
While we were weighing the pros and cons of the architects we’d interviewed, I made it a point to find every Orthodox priest I could who had been involved in building a church in the last couple decades. I called them all up, one-by-one, probably over 30 in all, and asked them to tell me their story. I asked them what they did, what it cost, how it worked out, what their regrets were, what worked and what didn’t, and so on. I also made it a point to go and visit some of their churches, especially those that were built by the architect we ended up hiring (Andrew Gould). Praying in those spaces in person tells you much of what you need to know.
One thing we realized right away was that Orthodox Churches should not be built “by committee”. That is, design decisions shouldn’t be a collection of the personal preferences of those doing the design. I think I might have scared off some prospective participants early on by saying something like, “If you have really strong opinions about this or that aspect of church design, you should probably not be in this group.” It is best, for the most part, to hire the right architect and follow his vision so that the building is a single unified whole rather than a piecemeal collection of everyone’s favorite ethnic nostalgia. Even so, there are still LOTS of decisions that the parish has to make within that framework. How does one go about doing that?
I would like to pick up on that the next time I write. But one thing that our group did in order to get on the same page, and to even establish a common vocabulary, was to do some reading, a LOT of reading. Since several people from other parishes have also asked me about this, I have already collected all relevant reading and materials that we could find on a building resources page here. I’ll be referencing those materials in future postings.
Blessings! – Fr Joshua