All hands on deck as church sees a massive conversion!

What do you do when God gives you two giant retail stores for free? Create a pop-up church, of course! Jason Ham tells the story

Rediscover Church in Exeter had a great problem. Bursting at the seams, they were struggling to seat the crowds flocking to their 9.30 and 11.30 Sunday services. So when an unusual solution came along they leapt at it and launched pop-up church.

The new venue came into being with a nudge from the Lord, explains Rediscover’s operations coordinator Jason Ham.

“We’d been looking for buildings over a number of years that we could convert into a church – new builds, older buildings, all sorts of different properties. Then one of our church members, Shaun McCaughan, felt a prompt from God to check the property website we’d been using. He looked and saw former Range and Matalan stores had just been listed.

People of all ages picked up their paintbrushes to design murals and decorate walls

“We were the first people to look around them and after a long journey with the relevant authorities, we finally got accepted to launch church into them! What’s even more miraculous is that, because of the various delays in obtaining permissions, the owner offered us the use of the two buildings rent-free!” So began the transformation of the two stores into a church and youth centre. It was all-hands-on-deck as Rediscover members pitched in to lay 16,000 carpet tiles, clean 1,000 chairs and paint everything from the kitchen, chill-out area and 1,000-seater auditorium to the youth and children’s facilities and toilets. They also built new stud wall rooms in order to launch four new creative and beautifully decorated kids rooms.

With services and ministries up and running there is still huge potential to do more, Jason says.

The Sunday auditorium space is now in use with around 700 on the first Sunday, and the playgroup has moved from its previous location.

Once squeezed into two rooms, Rediscover’s kids now have four lively rooms complete with Discovery Land, craft and teaching areas and indoor football!

“Lots of new parents have been checking out the new facility, including the soft play area and slide which are very popular!”

How long pop-up church will remain in its new location is open to question. Rediscover has the buildings until September, but then they are earmarked for demolition for houses.

The church is not worried though.

The whole church family got involved in readying the building

“A strength of our church is that we’re very agile. We have never tended to plan years in advance because we jump on opportunities as they arise so we don’t miss out on faith adventures that come about,” explains Jason.

“We firmly believe God knows the journey of our church long into the future and we trust our community in his hands wholeheartedly.

“Who knows – maybe one day God will give us a big permanent facility. But at the moment he’s invited us to take this step and create pop-up church. It’s certainly been quite a journey but it’s been amazing!”

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.

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