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Spanish Evangelical Church breaks ground on East Side
YOUNGSTOWN
The Spanish Evangelical Church will return to its roots on the East Side.
Ground was broken Sunday for a new, $1.2 million edifice for the 150-member church on a vacant, 15-acre site at Kendis Circle and Keystone Avenue.
The new building will be the first structure built specifically to house the church, which was founded in 1954 by a group of steel workers who came to the Mahoning Valley from Puerto Rico.
“We believe that God called us to the East Side. We initially were here when the church was founded on Wilson Avenue,” the Rev. Rolando Rojas, the church’s senior pastor, said at the groundbreaking site.
“We’re a multicultural, bilingual church. We not only minister to Hispanics, but we can also minister to Caucasians and African-Americans and anyone who speaks English or Spanish,” he said. “We focus inner-city. We want to stay inner-city. We think our calling has been for that,” he added.
The new building in the city’s Lincoln Knolls neighborhood is expected to open for worship about the middle of next year, the pastor said.
Its sanctuary will seat about 300 people, said Manuel Morales, church trustee.
The East Side has been home to the congregation for all but the last seven years, during which it has been renting worship space from Metro Assembly of God, 2530 South Ave.
Both congregations are affiliated with the Assemblies of God, which calls itself the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination with about 65 million adherents.
The new single-story, handicapped-accessible building will have a 15-by-35-foot elevated platform at the front of the sanctuary to accommodate services featuring multiple musicians, said Eric Payer, project manager with the M3 Development Group of Columbiana, the general contractor.
Besides having a nursery, preschool area and a kitchen, the building will have a flexible space that can be used in its entirety as a fellowship hall or divided into four 10-by-19-foot Sunday school classrooms.
“It’s just a very simple design that’s easily expanded in the future as the church continues to grow,” Payer said.
The site, which had been divided into 148 land parcels, was acquired by the church through donations and tax-lien sales.
During the groundbreaking ceremony, church members collected stones from a wheelbarrow for inclusion in the church’s foundation.
Besides clergy from the Spanish Evangelical Church and Metro Assembly, those attending included DeMaine Kitchen, the mayor’s chief of staff; T.J. Rodgers, 2nd Ward city councilman; Mahoning County Treasurer Dan Yemma; and Diane Vettori, the church’s lawyer, who also is a part-time county-court judge.
“All this vacant land is going to be now productive. We look at worship sites as being the foundation rocks of neighborhoods like this that have deteriorated. This is the first step in bringing these neighborhoods back,” Yemma said.
A site map displayed at the groundbreaking shows potential future basketball courts, an amphitheater, a perimeter walking path, additional parking and room for expansion of the building.