"Let's Go for It!"
One year ago we got serious about building a new church. Like a root-bound houseplant, our Sanctuary was literally bursting the small pot we had been planted in twenty-five years ago, and so you--the Vestry and people of St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert--committed yourselves to building a new container.
Our Fund-Raising Chairman and now Senior Warden, Al Hastings, stood before us one Sunday and made an impassioned plea for everyone's support. That Monday, as the Treasurer was sorting through the collection offerings, he came across a white offering envelope, the kind in your pews. On the front of this wrinkled envelope, written in pencil and in a script attributable to a seven- or eight-year old child, were these words--"Here's $183,420 for our new church." From inside the envelope Mildred shook out one dime, two nickels and three pennies: exactly twenty-three cents.
Those twenty-three cents have now multiplied over these past eight months to one hundred and seventy-five million cents; that's nearly two-tenths of a billion pennies. ($1,750,000 in cash and pledges.)
That young child's enthusiasm and instant generosity became for us, your leaders, a symbol. It was a green light, a clear signal that we might move ahead with confidence, determination, a whole lot of faith and, indeed if we're honest, a bit of trepidation as well.
Under the leadership of our Chairman Leonard Firestone, we prayed, then met with our chosen architect, Milton Chambers, contracted with a trusted local builder (Rancho Mirage Builders; Mike Fincher and Stormy Dayton), and said to each other and to God, "Let's Go for It!"
Well, friends, we did it and here we are two-thirds of a year later with two-thirds of our construction completed--building what may very well be one of the most beautiful churches in America and, as far as we know, the only large (over five hundred seats) Sanctuary under construction in the whole of The Episcopal Church.
We got off to what seemed to all of us an agonizingly slow start. Our church was a very complicated engineering design, and it took forever to complete the drawings and gain approval from our city and county officials. So we dug an enormous hole and we waited. And then, appropriately on Ash Wednesday, it all came together and we formally began construction. And once again it seemed an agonizingly long time as our builders laid in underground pipes and invisible utilities. We began to be known as the Episcopal-hole-in-the-desert.
Then one warm day in late spring, a trailer truck, loaded with concrete blocks, pulled into our driveway and parked at the edge of our "great hole." It wasn't long before six thousand of those concrete blocks were laid to complete our foundation. Real building had finally begun! And we all stopped holding our breath, as each new step in the building produced more and more visible evidence of what began to look like a church.
Soon afterward, fifty concrete trucks arrived to pour the massive fourteen-thousand-square-feet of Nave floor. (The church is two-hundred-feet long.) The pour was completed in one very long day, and for the next three days our building rested silently as the concrete cured and became strong enough to bear the weight of the remainder of the church and many hundreds of people. The hole was finally filled!
I arrived at church one early morning in July and discovered in our parking lot three enormous flatbed trucks filled with steel girders; I knew that we were about to rise up out of the ground and reach for the sky.
It was very exciting to watch seventy-five tons (one hundred and fifty thousand pounds) of steel hoisted into place by our "great blue crane"--most especially our four beautiful window frames. Each of these major windows was constructed on the ground, then hoisted up by the "great blue crane" and literally dropped into place. Then for weeks we watched husky steelworkers, balanced sky-high on hot steel beams, welding and bolting our structure into one solid unit.
During all this time, the enormous wooden roof trusses were being built and glue-laminated (some beams have twenty-five layers of wood) in far-off Idaho. About the time the steel was finished, they were trucked across country, and when they arrived at the California border they were stopped--"Too wide a load for California roads," said a border patrolman. And so, there at the California border, each great half-round beam had to be handsawed in half to meet the state's regulations for size!
When the beams arrived, so did the carpenters; and for most of this fall season they have been hammering and sawing and framing our roof. Each of the eight great hammertruss beams was put together on the Nave floor and then, like our steel window frames, lifted high by our now-familiar "great blue crane," and dropped into place. Incredible as it seemed to all of us who stood there watching and literally holding our breath, they fit!
In the great tradition of the English cathedral, some ninety thousand pounds of wooden beams not only support our roof, but will provide incredible beauty for worshippers inside. To close off the roof, our carpenters have nailed together over five miles of tongue-and-groove flats with God-only-knows how many nails.
This past Thursday our "great blue crane" lowered into place four major crossbeams which will form the centerpiece of the crossing--right over the altar. And by the end of the next two weeks, your wood roof will be complete. Al and Alan have scheduled for us all a Roof-Topping-Off Ceremony on Friday afternoon, December 2, at 3:00 p.m. to celebrate this symbolic phase of our building progress.
There's lots more work to be done, of course...walls to be built, windows fitted into their frames, and probably a thousand details to be worked out...but we are headed on track for completion this spring, one year after the first concrete block went into the great Episcopal hole.
About six weeks ago I walked through our structure with an architect friend and supporter. Upon completion of the tour he said to me, "Brad, I now see why this is costing so much. This building is absolutely first-class and will last a thousand years."
His words affirmed the many individual decisions of our Building Committee to build a quality church. There were many temptations to build more quickly and cheaply and to cut corners. For example, when the lot just above the Rectory/Office became available, we purchased it to provide for additional parking and, eventually, a site for our school. And rather than put up a much cheaper shingle roof which would have to be replaced within fifteen to twenty years, we decided to permanently cover the roof with durable and beautiful copper sheathing.
We knew that the magnificent skylight which runs the entire length and breadth of the church to form a cross would add to the initial cost of our building. But we also knew that if we didn't put it in now it would never go in.
We also decided to upgrade our windows in Thermopaned thickness...once these enormous windows are set into place they will be most difficult to change. You might like to know that fifty percent of our surface area is window, and thus higher initial cost....
Finally, I think it is important to keep in mind this morning, as we prepare to tour our beautiful Sanctuary and to enter the final stretch of building, that we are building for the future as well as for our obvious present needs. I am personally convinced that there will be a great resurgence of church attendance and membership as we enter the last ten years of this millennium. This nation was founded on a premise that God undergirds the whole of our life and operates personally in our lives and in our history. Secular humanism, Scientology, Self-Realization, New Age Spirituality and the like only marginally fulfill people's spiritual needs, and so I believe that as these people return to church and God in greater numbers, we will be ready to open wide these great doors and welcome them Home. Amen.
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