Master Plan

The What: What’s the plan.

Mainly, a thousand-seat sanctuary, with an adjacent 100-seat day chapel. And nested in the day chapel, our new chapel of Perpetual Adoration… We would also have a narthex big enough to meet and greet for friendship and fellowship.

Our current sanctuary seats about 450. The new sanctuary would have a choir loft.

The No. 1 question about the plan: Will we keep our stained glass? Yes.

There’s more information in the newsletter we produced for parishioners in February. You can download it below.

The Why:  Why do we need a new church.

One reason: It’s too small. There’s no room for growth -- and no, adding more Masses isn’t a viable option. It doesn’t solve the problem of having a facility that’s outlived its sustainability by twice.

Which brings us to the most practical reason: The upkeep is too expensive. Since Father Reginald got here, we’ve spent about $400,000 in needed repairs. Some of these repairs probably should have been made a long time ago. Even so, the older the church gets, the faster things start wearing out and breaking down. We have more than $600,000 worth of repairs we’re not making.  

We’ve reached the tipping point.

So, rather than spending a million or more dollars to patch up this church – which won’t make it any younger or bigger -- the prudent investment would be to build a new church. That’s not merely our conclusion. That comes from the Archdiocese.

After we explained the bad economics of making more repairs, one parishioner replied, “We can’t keep kicking the can down the road.”

The How.  How much is this going to cost.

The rough estimate is $10 million to do everything that those of you who participated in our 2014 survey told us was important to you. Eighty percent of you said that building a new sanctuary was most important to you. The rough estimate on that alone is closer to $6 million, varying mostly on the hundreds of choices we make, like, do we sit on plywood pews or solid wood.

Our general contractor is Paradigm Construction. The company’s leadership has a lot of experience building churches. One of the reasons we chose them is that they have a solid reputation for costing out multimillion-dollar projects and completing those projects with a low margin of error.

Whatever we can raise ourselves, if the cardinal believes we gave it our best effort, the Archdiocese would likely match our funds in a low-interest, long-term loan. Typically, in these kinds of projects, the Archdiocese helps us find a guarantor so we don’t have to bank all our pledges before we break ground. The fact that we don’t have any debt works in our favor.

The second How: How are we going to pay for it.

The answer ….

Together. … ALL of us, together.