New building will help serve community
Senior Pastor Steve Dusek’s favorite thing about The Orchard Church’s new building is the children’s area.
With big TVs, child-friendly bathrooms and even an ADHD and autism-friendly sensory room, it’s built to help kids grow in the faith.
“It’s to minister to these kids as best as we can,” Senior Pastor Steve Dusek said.
The church is inviting all interested people to attend its first services at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 9. The new building is located at 534 Highland Parkway, Ellijay.
“We’re just gonna be talking about how grateful we are to God for what he’s done,” Dusek said.
The new church has about more than twice the sanctuary space of The Orchard Church’s old building.
“In two hours, we can go up to 1,000 people,” Dusek said. “Plus, it’ll be a real good home base for us to do the community outreach stuff that we do.
Extra space will allow the church’s popular Celebrate Recovery program to host both indoor meetings and outdoor dinners.
This program reaches out to people hoping to move on from hurt, bad habits, addiction and other issues.
“Part of the goal of this building was to be able to cram as many of them into this atrium as possible,” Dusek said. “And my hope is that they can also come outside. We built a kitchen with a big serving window right here, and we’ve got two firepits where they can sit and eat out here and watch the sun go down over the Cohuttas.”
The building is designed with security in mind, with separate areas for children’s classes, many cameras and a security room.
“We have a highly trained safety team, we’ve got about 70 cameras, and a whole team of people, everything from nurse practitioners to a heart doctor,” Worship Pastor Jeff Parker said.
Before construction started, the new church building was projected to cost $8.7 million.
This figure seemed extremely high for The Orchard Church’s congregation. But several surprising donations made it possible with no debt.
“I would have lunch with somebody what I’d never met before, and that doesn’t go to our church. And they would hand me a $1 million check,” Dusek said. “And that kind of story has happened multiple times to make all this possible.”
In the end, the building finished about half a million under budget and about months ahead of schedule, Dusek said.
Some of the money allowed the church to buy a few special features.
“God has just made this possible in a miraculous way, and we’re just not going to try to contain it,” he said.
The intense levels of participation and generosity from congregation members reminded Dusek of the biblical book of Nehemiah.
The scripture tells the story of the leader Nehemiah and the Jewish exiles who banded together to rebuild Jerusalem after it was destroyed by the Babylonians.
“Nehemiah went and surveyed everything,” Dusek said. “He was meticulous about knowing what they needed, and then he rallied the people around it, and everybody came from all over the place and worked together to make sure those walls got rebuilt. That’s what I’ve seen happening here.”
Night after night, congregation members have come to help assemble furniture, put in wiring and get the building serviceable, Dusek said.
While a completed building is worth celebrating, church is always about people, Parker said.
“At the end of the day, this is a great place to do worship, and God’s called us to do it. But it’s a building. You and I are the Temple now,” Parker said.