ARLINGTON — As far as Pastor Rick Schranck is concerned, the measure of a church is not its facilities, but its congregation.
That’s why he and his parishioners have been content to convene services for Christ the King Community Church at Presidents Elementary for the past 11 years.
However, once an opportunity opened up for them to move into a building of their own, without dipping too much into their coffers, church members threw themselves into the task of making a home for themselves along the recently refurbished 67th Avenue, right next door to Hubb’s Pizza & Pasta.
“We didn’t want to go into debt on any building, because we wanted that money to go toward our missions and other projects, but we always had our eyes open,” Schranck said.
Church member Don Beckwith serves as an inspector for the Snohomish County Fire Marshal, so between that and his father’s work as an architect, he’s well-versed in evaluating the habitability of old buildings. The structure at 21108 67th Ave. NE was originally built as a creamery in the early 1900s, and had previously housed tenants including the Arlington Kickboxing Academy. By the time Beckwith took a look at it on Sept. 7 of last year, it had been foreclosed on and bank-owned for about a year.
“It was in distress,” Beckwith said. “I was intrigued because it was an ugly building. They’d just redone the whole street, so that looked great, but then you had this eyesore of a building. It had more space than I’d thought, though, and the way it was put together lent itself to our needs. The bare bones of the building were good.”
Given that the trussed had been installed more recently than the rest following a fire about 30 years ago, Beckwith concluded that a crew of church volunteers could just gut the interior of the building, taking out 12-foot-tall walls and leaving the shell behind.
The church closed on the property Dec. 22 and began demolition work Dec. 26. Every Saturday since, until May 10, crews of 10-20 volunteers have come in and worked until about 5 p.m., while Beckwith and his partner, Max Gangwer, also worked Mondays through Fridays of every week, from the time they got off work until about 9 p.m.
“The sanctuary used to be a meat locker, so the floor sloped toward a drain,” Beckwith said. “We were already leveling the floor with gypcrete when we got the idea to install in-floor radiant heating. It only costs pennies to heat the building that way.”
This required them not only to lay down 2-inch-thick insulation and a layer of wire mesh, but also to secure 2,200 feet of hose to 250 anchor nails.
“That’s a lot of work on your knees, which gets to be hard for guys in their sixties like us,” said Rick Oosterwyk Sr., another church volunteer.
While there are still a few areas left to touch up, church members consider their efforts to be well worth it, since they now have a sanctuary that can seat as many as 200 parishioners, complete with a band area and two built-in overhead projectors, as well as an adjoining “cry room” for mothers with babies, three separate kids’ rooms and an apartment for a youth pastor. Those who walk in the front door will even find a coffee area waiting for them.
“We drink coffee before our services,” said Beckwith, who was able to obtain a granite countertop worth $4,000 for free. “Our chairs even have coffee cup holders.”
Schranck added: “We could plant the seed of this church wherever we needed, because God would bring it up.”
