Calvary Christian updates facility with $4 million addition

Burgeoning membership led church to build 24,000 square foot sanctuary
 
Come Memorial Day, the members of the Calvary Christian Assembly of God Church will have a much larger space to worship in. The church is building a new, 24,000-square-foot sanctuary as an addition to their current 6,000 square-foot building.
Caryn McDonnell, the church’s business administrator and one of its senior pastors, said a growing membership led them to build the new sanctuary. When she and her husband, Floyd McDonnell, the church’s lead pastor, came to Calvary, the church had about 12 to 15 members. Today, the church has over 300 members and 225 to 250 attend services each week.
“We've just outgrown our facility,” McDonnell said.
The new building will be used as a meeting place for the church’s worship services, but McDonnell said it would also house other ministries that their current facility doesn’t have room for.
“We will use it for our Sunday worship services and our discipleship classes, as well as just an outreach for our community,” she said, “because we will have a will have a food pantry that will be part of this build as well. That's something that we do that we don't have any (space for). It's (currently) in the basement of a person's home right now, and so we’re going to be able to do that at the church facility.”
McDonnell said the church will also offer educational services to help members deal with matters of concern to them.
 “We’ll be doing what we call need-based classes, opportunities to do things like Financial Peace University to help people with learning how to handle their money according to biblical principles,” she said. “We’ll be doing parenting classes, we will have some grief and some recovery classes, (and) we hope to be able to use the new spaces for all of those things.”
Calvary is investing $4 million in the construction of their new sanctuary. They raised a little over a third of the money before construction began and are financing the rest through a bank loan. McDonnell said the fact that the church as able to raise as much as they did during the pandemic was nothing short of a “miracle.”
“Our church has raised about a million and a half dollars of that money to get the project started … so we'll have a little bit of a mortgage on that, but it’s been a miracle to, in the middle of COVID, raise a million-and-a-half dollars in the middle of that little cow pasture,” she said.
McDonnell also stressed that the church is not building their new place of worship not to show off, but to as a means to reach out to their community.
“We're not trying to build some grand piece of architecture,” she said. “For us, it's really a tool for ministry. We don't have the space to do what we need to do, and that's why we're building; that was our initial … purpose for building it. It’s not just about building a building, it's a tool for ministry to reach people. We really look forward to serving our community.”
The Calvary Christian Assembly of God is located at 9048 West State Highway 266 in Springfield. For information about services or the new building, visit their website at www.calvarychristianag.org or visit their Facebook page.