Our Building: After worshiping in a YMCA for years, we moved into this building on Easter Sunday 2006.

There are a few ‘big ideas’ (read: theology) we hoped to communicate through this structure:

1. Rawness and Beauty.

Particularly in the gathering space and the front tower, these two elements are intentionally juxtaposed. Rawness – open ceilings, metal beams exposed, chain link fencing, metal bands on doors, rough cement floor, jagged metal material on the Cross Sculpture, etc.. These materials represent people – raw, unfinished, in process. That is what humanity brings to worship. Beauty – stone, fire, wood (the entry wooden floor is heart of pine from the old Pillowtex Mill in Kannapolis, NC), etc. These materials represent the beauty and love of God. The cross on the front tower and the worship mural in the gathering space represent the fact that in Christ-centered worship, our rawness is brought into the loving presence of the glory of God, and transformation mystically happens.

2. Beauty and Matter both matter.

We hoped to consciously counteract what we believe has been a Docetic trend among many recent ‘contemporary’ church buildings (‘build it as big and cheaply as possible, who cares that it looks like Wal-Mart or a cheap corporate office’). Docetism, implicit within much of conservative Protestantism, is an overemphasis on the divine nature of Jesus, at the expense of his human nature. Pastorally, this has the effect of treating bodies, our labor, physical beauty, etc. as ‘secular’ or ‘not important to my faith’ and not valuable to God. It is a creation-denying theological error that our specific theological tradition has tended toward. Therefore, in an attempt to ‘preach’ a more whole view of Christ and the human self to ourselves, we attempted to pay attention to beauty in the construction of the building. On a very limited budget. One of our dreams would be to build a stone neo-gothic cathedral in which to hold our wide-open, sometimes goofy, sometimes intense rock-worship gatherings.