HOOVER, Alabama - The mammoth Church of the Highlands this Sunday is moving worship services for its Greystone campus from Greystone Elementary School to a new 50,000-square-foot building off Alabama 119.
The church, which has seven campuses spread across Alabama, has had a group meeting at Greystone Elementary School in Hoover for about 3 ? years but has outgrown the gymnasium there.
The Greystone congregation started with about 500 people attending and has grown to an average attendance of 1,000 people in three worship services, said Joshua Canizaro, the Greystone campus pastor.
Church of the Highlands bought 35 acres along Alabama 119, about a mile north of U.S. 280, and converted a vacant two-story office building into a church building. The Greystone campus is doubling its seating capacity from 375 at Greystone Elementary to 780 at the new facility, Canizaro said.
They will keep three worship services - at 8, 9 and 11:30 a.m., allowing room for growth.
"We're pretty excited about it," Canizaro said. "What has happened in our church has been a miracle ... Our vision for this area is to commit to reach folks who are far from God and help them connect in a healthy relationship."
That begins with a connection to God and expands to a connection with other people who are also seeking God and discovering their purpose in life and place of service, he said.
Canizaro, who has been with Church of the Highlands since he moved from Louisiana in 2004, has led the Greystone campus from the start.
"The community relationship has really been awesome," he said. "Hoover City Schools, as well as the faculty at the school, have really been amazing to work with."
Canizaro said he always felt the gymnasium at Greystone Elementary was ideal for a church service because the arched wooden ceiling resembles a traditional church ceiling. However, volunteers won't miss having to spend three hours each Saturday setting up a stage, seating, lights and a sound system for Sunday services and then having to take it all down afterward, he said.
Having an auditorium with a permanent stage and seating will make the meeting place feel more like a church home, said Jeff Cooke, a church member who lives in Greystone.
To make the new Greystone campus work, the church had to quadruple the parking available at the office building, up to 570 parking places, church leaders said.
The building, as originally designed, works well for a church because it had a large two-story open area in the middle that was easy to convert into an auditorium and lobby, said Layne Schranz, an associate pastor who oversees all the Church of the Highlands campuses.
Large rooms will be used for kindergarten and elementary students, and a few walls were added to create smaller rooms for the nursery and preschool children, Schranz said. Offices that were on the second floor will be used for Highlands College, a full-time, accredited college that now has about 150 students learning how to be full-time ministers, he said.
There are no adult small group meetings on Sunday mornings at Highlands campuses. Those take place during the week in people's homes and other places in the community, Schranz said. The adult gathering on Sundays is the worship service, which includes a video message from Senior Pastor Chris Hodges, simulcast live from the Grants Mill Road campus in Irondale.
But each of the seven Church of the Highlands campuses has a live band to lead in worship and a live pastor on site to welcome people, lead them and minister to them.
Cooke started attending Church of the Highlands when it was still meeting at Mountain Brook High School, before it moved to Grants Mill Road. He became more active two or three years ago and occasionally would attend the Greystone campus when he and his family were running late, he said.
He got to know Canizaro and started attending one of his small groups, and he and his family decided to make the Greystone campus their home several months ago, he said.
He had to adjust to the message being delivered by simulcast video but knew the Greystone campus was the place for his family, he said.
"I feel so fed when I'm here, and it helps me in my day-in and day-out walk," he said. "I just feel this church is alive. It's a living, breathing organism. Sometimes you just grow up in religion and you get caught up in doing what you do because you need to do it and because it's Biblical and not because you want to do it. Here, it's something I look forward to participating in, whether it's Sunday or Wednesday night services or prayer services ... You get so much out of it."
"It's one large church with different campuses, probably more for convenience than anything," Cooke said. "It's hard to reach out to an entire community when you have one location."
Church of the Highlands this past quarter averaged about 18,600 people attending its seven campuses and just before Thanksgiving had more than 21,000 people present, Schranz said.
The Grants Mill campus has close to 10,000, while there typically are 3,400 in Riverchase, 1,900 in Auburn, 1,100 in Tuscaloosa, 1,000 in Greystone, 800 in Montgomery and 400 in Woodlawn, Schranz said.
The church in February plans to open a campus at Fultondale Elementary School and has a vision for more campuses within a two-hour radius of Birmingham in the future, he said.
Growth at Church of the Highlands, which started in 2001 with 350 people attending, has made it the largest church in Alabama and one of the fastest-growing churches in the country.
People often ask how the church grew so quickly. Schranz said the church was started with prayer and fasting and that remains the core of everything they do.
"We pray and fast every January for three weeks as a church," he said. There's also a 21-day focus on prayer each August and a prayer time each Saturday, he said. "We really are desperate for God to show up."
The church's growth certainly is not due to the intellect or talent of its leaders, he said. "It has to be God. We just pray for His grace and know that He can do far more than we can do on our own," he said.
"We need the power of God. He's the one who changes lives. It's not us," he said. "We want to try to have an environment where God can touch people's lives - where his presence is real. We're just as blown away as anybody else."
Church of the Highlands is a non-denominational church but helped found the Association of Related Churches, which includes about 800 partner churches across the United States, including 299 churches that were started from scratch, Schranz said.
For more information, go to the Church of the Highlands website.
Here's a link to information about the Greystone campus.
To see more news from Hoover, go to www.al.com/hoover
Source: http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/12/church_of_the_highlands_to_ope.html
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