I looked and looked through online albums and actual books of pictures, trying to decide what the FIRST photo I took at our current (for another 9 days) church location.
As near as I can tell, the first photos I took were for the sewing blog in 2004, documenting the costuming for our inaugural production of 'The Gospel According to Scrooge':
Through a series of amazing events, we ended up purchasing a building at 2300 Memorial Parkway that had housed a genetics company...but prior to that, it had been as shopping center that featured a Service Merchandise.
We actually have stuff in our house that was purchased from that Service Merchandise back in the 80's.
We moved into the 2300 Memorial Parkway in July of 2003, literally right before we had to be out of the previous location, squeezing ourselves into a small auditorium they had, with a stage that was probably no more than 8 feet deep.
Why did a genetics company have an auditorium? Who knows? We had three services a weekend there to get everyone in while they gutted a series of labs/clean rooms and converted them into the current sanctuary.
We got the Certificate of Occupation from the Fire Marshall for the sanctuary the day before our annual Women's conference. The fumes from the carpet glue, which had been laid that week, were so strong that one of our speakers had a serious respiratory reaction and almost ended up in the hospital. She did end up spending one of the sessions doing breathing treatments in her hotel room.
There's an amazing testimony from that...we stopped the service and had special prayer for her, and literally at that time something shifted and she found herself able to breathe.
The sanctuary seemed huge. It seated about 1000 folks, had three cameras running and amazing lighting. I remember walking in and having to remind myself that this was my church...not a special conference event somewhere.
And the church grew.
We outgrew that huge space at least 3 times. We converted large spaces into smaller offices, moved the main doors, added windows, refurbished and updated, cramming classrooms and offices wherever and however we could.
We launched satellite campuses to hold overflow. We added services back...once more, we're doing three services a weekend to accommodate everyone.
So many memories. So many adventures. So many encounters. We did The Gospel According to Scrooge twice, we did several Bible-based costumed Easter productions.
We're being encouraged to post photos and memories, with the hashtag Celebrate 2300 to link them all together.
I commented that I could go through the photos in my Facebook Albums and hashtag Celebrate 2300 to about 2/3 of the pictures. But I don't have pictures that really document the history of our sojourn there.
We've been in that building nearly 15 years. I can't begin to list the significant moments, the wonderful people, the blessings. I've been on staff since 2009; I can tell you that it ain't a perfect church. But it is a church that loves God and loves people and is making a difference in our city.
We have one more Sunday set of services there...and we'll be boxing up stuff the rest of that Sunday. The last moving trucks will pull up on 1/29 and 1/30 to haul the remaining goods to the 'new' building...a retired high school. 2300 has already been sold to another church...who has already started some renovations in the areas that we moved out of in December.
We'll stilll be holding three services a weekend in the theater to accommodate the folks while the gymnasium is converted into a sanctuary that will seat somewhere around 1,600. It should be done late in the spring.
I need to take more pictures. Someday we may want to review what it looked like back in 2018 when we moved in to the work in progress...
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