First Baptist Church has begun work on Phase 2 of a project more than a decade in the making to expand its downtown ministry.
The church broke ground on a $3.4 million expansion of its building on Bluecutt Road last month. The addition will make more space for the church’s preschool and children’s programs.
It’s the second step of what business administrator Ricky Pounders called a “multi-phase project.”
“I think overall the church is excited about the future and the possibilities that this particular building is going to better provide for us to better meet the spiritual needs of the community,” said church pastor Shawn Parker.
The expansion adds 17,600 square feet to the current building, said Ricky Mordecai with Columbus-based Burks-Mordecai Builders, who is overseeing the project.
“We’ve finished the earthwork and started some of the underslab plumbing, low-grade plumbing,” Mordecai said, adding the overall project will include multiple classrooms and a safe room shelter in case of bad weather.
And while bad weather has already delayed the project by a few days, Pounders and Mordecai both noted the addition is slated to be complete by March 2020.
The expansion doesn’t quite double the size of the building already in place, which — until construction on the expansion started — hosted Sunday night worship services as well as Wednesday night events and other special programs.
“We have women’s Bible studies going out there on Thursday morning seasonally,” Pounders said. “We’ll have member weddings, showers, baby showers, those kind of events. We do allow some limited use by the community for ministry-related events that we’ll have from time to time out there but it’s very lightly used currently.”
The church officially decided in 2005 to sell its building on Seventh Street and start what was planned to be a permanent move to Bluecutt Road. FBC’s downtown facility is still not sold, and the church hosts Sunday morning worship and other functions there.
Pounders said church administrators are also in the planning stages of Phase 3, though what all that will entail is “to be determined” since none of the ideas have been brought before the church congregation yet.
He said some of the church’s plans will depend on the status of First Baptist’s Seventh Street building. Crye-Leike Properties Unlimited is marketing the building for $1.5 million. There hasn’t been any recent interest from buyers though, Pounders said, and he indicated the church wants to have an option in place both in case the building sells and in case it doesn’t.
“Obviously if the property sells, that will dictate what we do, but if the property does not sell then we’ll continue to include (the downtown) campus as part of our overall footprint here in Columbus,” he said. “Right now we still have offices located here, we still have our school located here, our pre-school. You still have all our benevolence ministries here, so history, library. … We still have several major components of ministry work here in Columbus still in this campus.”
The oldest part of that building, the church sanctuary, was built in the late 1830s. With that much history behind it, Pounders said there are mixed feelings in the church about the move.
“As a church, we’re over 185 years old, so there is a lot of history downtown, a lot of multi-generational history,” he said. “You have families that were born here, got baptized here, got married here, had funerals here and had future generations born here, so there’s always a lot of rich history any time you have that long of a history at one location.
“But there’s also an excitement, an excitement of what that future holds,” he added. “As a church, our goal is to be externally focused, so we’re all the time thinking (about) those we’ve not reached yet, and those that haven’t been born yet and those that haven’t grown up yet, so we want to honor our history but we also want to have a vision for the future, and we believe that can be balanced both ways.”
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Ricky Pounders, business administrator at First Baptist Church of Columbus, shows a picture of how the church's building on Bluecutt Road will look once construction is complete on an expansion. The addition will house the church's children's programs and is scheduled to be completed in March 2020. Photo by: Isabelle Altman/Dispatch Staff
Shawn Parker
