Decatur Church of God recently completed another step to a journey that began a little more than eight years ago.
After holding services in a double-wide mobile home for the past eight years, the church opened its brand new sanctuary last month.
Pastor Ed Dickerson, who started the church in August 2009, said the new building started out as an open-air pavilion, and he decided to build it into the congregation’s new place of worship.
“It was for the youth, and we had some picnics or other things here. With the economy like it is, I was just afraid to venture out with our little group of people and get them in debt,” Dickerson said. “I got to praying and thinking about it and said, ‘what we need to do is use what we’ve got down here,’ and that’s what we did.”
While the steel structure was being closed in and the interior was constructed, the congregation continued to hold services in the double wide, which formerly housed Head Start classrooms after Hurricane Katrina. Dickerson is most proud that they were able to build the church without accumulating more debt, but said that they got plenty of help along the way.
“We’ve had a lot of people that have helped us. Some were connected with the church, some were not,” he said. “Some were businessmen in the area that just come up and helped us with donations that we didn’t ask for, and we’re just tickled to death over it. People have been good to us.”
The new sanctuary can hold more than 100 worshipers, and includes a kitchen, two adult class rooms, three children’s classrooms and an office. The church pews were donated by a church in Shreveport, La., The floor of the church is also sloped towards the pulpit, which follows the natural topography of the land.
“It works out good because the person who sits in front of you doesn’t block you,” Dickerson said.
The church also has the podium from which Dickerson preached his first sermon when he was still in high school. The local church that had the podium still had it in storage, and Dickerson’s children asked the church if they could donate it.
Dickerson said the church sanctuary is only the second phase of a three-phase building project for the church, and they plan to build a bigger sanctuary in the future and use the present sanctuary as a fellowship hall.
