Church Tour

I don't think a church tour would really be necessary except for the fact that this church is still under construction...and used to be a cigar factory. I think that's noteworthy enough for a post! So here's the outside:

You can see the main entrance has yet to be completed, but that's ok, because the foyer and main sanctuary aren't finished yet either. So we use a side entrance to go to the sanctuary in the basement. The entire first floor is space used for church classrooms; the space on the far left is the room used by the mom & baby group each week (lots of non-church folks attend this, which is great) and it looks like a little preschool room. It also has a small kitchenette. The corner room on the right is the designated pastors office. (a corner office with a view, ha ha)

The floors above are currently all apartments. There are currently three apartments in the building, one large 4bdrm on the top floor, and two smaller ones on the second floor. One of the smaller apartments is really supposed to be a classroom/youth room, but was repurposed into an apartment. The bedroom in this one sports the big round stained glass window. Interesting, right?

Back when it was a cigar factory they used the large room in the basement to stack tobacco leaves. Now it's used as the sanctuary (who would've guessed, right?):

It's really a pretty large space, isn't it? I like how it has so much natural light, despite being in the basement; you don't feel like you're in the catacombs. However, the windows/doors face the main street in town, so you see at least 3 noisy tractors go lumbering by during each Sunday service. It gets about 3/4 full on an average Sunday morning. The congregation is pretty gifted, musically-speaking, so that music corner is used by nearly everybody. Of course my dad had to get a picture of Stefan standing behind the pulpit -Stefan hadn't even preached here yet!

There's no nursery, but there's a room with a large glass window (see B, below) that looks into this sanctuary in the back. There are lots of babies and toddlers in the church, so it's nice that they can be somewhere separate, yet still see the service. There's a speaker to pipe in what's going on in the sanctuary, and there's also a kitchen. This room also turns into the 'bistro' area every two weeks after the service.

Some other spaces currently in use, or available for use, are:

A) The designated pastor's office upstairs. If you went in those big doors, this would be the first room on the right. It's quite a massive space; there's room for the desk off in one nook, and then a huge open space for rows of bookshelves, a sitting area, and a kitchenette will eventually be added by the sitting area.

C) This is the hallway off the basement sanctuary. It's a hub of sorts; schedules and notices are up on the bulletin board, everybody has a mailbox to check each week, etc.

D) This room is right off the sanctuary downstairs. It's actually about double this length and is the youth room. The youth room also features a tiny kitchen in the back (yes, there are LOTS of kitchens in this building!). I think there are about 16 kids every week who come to Teenkreis (teen circle), almost all of them are from Erda and surrounding villages. The church itself doesn't have too many kids in this age bracket. I think it's great that this many non-church kids will come, and that their parents are ok with this. Next week I'll be going to a meeting to learn more about the youth program and where I might fit in.

Going upstairs, we'll see the main construction area. Every Saturday a few people will show up to work on construction. So the group of people you see below are the die hards -excluding Stefan and I! These guys, and a few others, have been working on this church for the past 10+ years. (yes, I know) Basically the building and materials are funded, but the manpower was budgeted as member work. Since people in the church are also experienced builders, that's what they decided to do, even though they knew it would take a while. At times outside help has come in for special projects, and several years ago a group of workers came over from the US for a week of speed building, but as you can see, there's still a ways to go.

Oddly enough, it's not as bad as it looks. The main problem seems to be twofold: They had a great site engineer for many years, but then he passed away suddenly. Another rose up to take his place, not as experienced, but capable, however he was struck with cancer and needed to take a long time off from the project. As the clock ticked, the building codes changed. So now another exit needs to be created somehow, a doorway raised, etc. He's back, but it's at a slower pace.

The second part of the problem is manpower. Because of the baby boom the church has experienced, it's hard for young fathers with building experience to build every week. Many of these young fathers are also doing further education with night and/or weekend school. Then there are those of us who are just plain unskilled (ahem). Stefan and I are pretty handy, Stefan moreso, but wiring, pipes, building walls, etc. are things we simply have no experience with. If there were clearer communication about little jobs to do, I think people like us would feel more enabled.

E) This is upstairs in the balcony.

F) Looking from the balcony down into the future sanctuary. There will be a baptismal in the bottom left corner, under that blue tarp. To the left, behind the wall, are several rooms. Some will be bathrooms and change rooms for those days somebody gets baptized, another will be a large parent/child room like downstairs.

G) This is downstairs, under the balcony, and just inside the sanctuary. The big open doorway behind me leads to the space that's supposed to become the main kitchen. (I know, kind of random location) It's a massive room.

H) If you were to look forward from the entrance into the sanctuary, this is what you'd see. The sanctuary expands off to the right and (you can't see it) has a wall of tall windows that go out to the main street. In the back corner is a small room, theoretically a prayer room.

So, it's pretty huge. There are so many rooms that didn't get mentioned or photographed, but this is the basic idea. When you consider the apartments upstairs and all the finished classrooms in the basement, it's pretty crazy that they've come as far as they have. We know God provides. It would be really amazing to actually see it finished, wouldn't it? I think a lot of people in the church are ready for that day to come!