New church building hosts first service

What once was a vision of turning an old Walmart building into a place of worship is now reality.

Members of Hillcrest Evangelical Free Church in Seward held their first worship service in their newly renovated church home south of Seward on Feb. 12.

The Rev. Curt Coddington said it was an emotional day for many of the members.

“We had people who walked in and just started crying,” he said.

The project began in 2008 after the church purchased the building and held a service that May in what then looked like an empty retail store.

“We taped out where the walls would be and met where the sanctuary would be,” he said. “It was a big empty building at that point. And then we started tearing things out.”

Coddington said there was period of time where progress was slow because they were waiting on some engineering work and permits to be finished.

It took the church a year longer than what they had originally planned but during its first service, that didn’t matter. This was an experience that many of the members had a hand in making the vision become reality.

Coddington said that they estimated that 80 percent of the work done on the site was completed by church members.

The church began talking to Walmart and associates about purchasing the building in the fall of 2007.

Prior to that, Coddington said they had started looking at their current facility which was on West Hillcrest Drive.

“We determined how much we could build on that site because there’s a wetland on there so we knew we couldn’t build past that. We could have done our next build on that site and that would have been fine but that would have been it. It would have filled up our site,” he said.

Church members then began looking at off site locations.

When they heard about the building south of Seward, Coddington said they found out that the advantage was the parking lot.

“They told us to develop parking spaces is $1,300 a space. And we have over 300 spaces so we basically paid for the parking lot and got the building for free,” he said. “And as a church, we probably would have never gotten to the parking lot.”

Coddington said they got twice as much building as they would have been able to afford if they had built new.

Because it was a large retail store, the design includes large areas and rooms.

From the beginning, they stripped out as much of the old building as they could from the ceiling to the floor tile and carpeting. Then, they cut the middle section out of the building.

“Then we put in a pre-engineered steel building in that middle section that was taller than the rest. We started building walls and relocating furnaces, reworking infrastructure, water lines and electric lines to fit our needs rather than a retail store,” Coddington said.

Some of the utility work had to be hired out to get done but all the drywall, painting and carpet laying was completed by church members.

“There’s only a few aspects of the project that we didn’t have a hand in,” he said.

He said that they hired the plumbing to be done but they dug all the trenches for the pipes so they wouldn’t have to pay for that.

“We served as our own general contractors,” Coddington said.

Their original plan was to start as the general contractors and then eventually hire one but they never did.

Doing their own work paid off for the church.

“Between the general contractor savings and the volunteer labor savings, we quit counting at $1 million and that was six months to a year ago,” Coddington said.

On Feb. 12, Coddington said everybody was happy and excited.

“I just wanted to get through it without falling on my face or something,” he said with a laugh.

Since then, the reality of the change has set in.

“This is our home. It’s not a work site anymore. This is my office. So it’s a huge relief to be done and be able to do ministry like I like to do it. It was just very gratifying to see how it impacted people even if it didn’t impact me because I was still detail,” Coddington said.

When asked what people’s reaction were that Sunday, Coddington said they were moved by it.

“They were convinced that the Spirit of God was here. It was like the building became the church it was designed to be rather than the work site. And that was a huge transition for them,” he said.

Coddington said their attendance on average runs around 350 people.

The building is set up on a loop with the sanctuary in the middle.

The church layout includes one main hallway that loops around with the sanctuary and gynmanisum inside the loop and offices, classrooms and fellowship hall on the exterior of the loop.

The sanctuary has an open contemporary feel with high open ceilings.

Coddington said plans are being made to have an open house for the community on March 18.

“Because we want the community to know that it’s here for community events and ways in which we desire to serve the community,” he said.

The church still has plans to finish the sanctuary which doesn’t have an advanced sound system or finished lighting yet.