MERIDIAN, Miss. (Queen City Newsfeed) – Demolition started Wednesday on the old Family Bowl Lanes on North Hills Street also known as Dixie Bowl.
This is part of Northcrest Baptist Church’s new expansion project.
Senior Paster Wade Phillips said the church purchased this property 5 years ago with plans to turn it into a new student center.
“We wanted to stay here on North Hills Street, and this gives us an opportunity to do this, while at the same time being able to invest back into the City of Meridian and take this property that was in, you know, that was not in great shape, and turn it into something we think will be great for the city,” said Phillips.
Phillips said church leaders have spent the last few years developing a plan of action for the space.
“We had originally thought about, that we were going to, actually, we were going to renovate this building. That was the plan from the beginning when we bought it, buy as we began to talk with the architects and look at the property and look at prices, we realized that it was just more financially feasible for us to go ahead and tear the building down and start over,” said Phillips.
The new space will be a student center that church leaders say will be 4 times the size of the current center.
Student Pastor Caleb Monaghan said their student ministries span from 7th to 12th grade and 8 different area schools are represented in their youth group.
“You hear it all the time, they’re our future, but they’re not just our future. They’re out right now, too, and we believe that firmly here at Northcrest. So, what we want to do is we want to invest in them now, so they can start making an impact now, and this is going to be a great facility for us to not just attract those students here with the games and the bells and whistles, but it’s also going to be an opportunity for us to disciple them and build them up in Jesus to go out into their schools,” said Monaghan.
With the new building comes room for a lot of upgrades.
“It’s going to be a great welcoming place when you come in where we’re going to have our volunteers who are going to be welcoming our students. We’re going to have a lot of classrooms for discipleship opportunities and Sunday morning Bible Study. We’re also going to have a place where we feed our students on Wednesday nights. So, we’re going to have a place specifically designated to that,” said Monaghan. “It’s going to be a great dining hall that’s to play and kind of feed over into what’s going to be a big game room. We hope to have any and all games that we can have from arcade style to ping pong and other things.”
“We’re going to have an awesome worship space for our big events throughout the year, but also every Wednesday night,” said Monaghan.
There’s no set price on what this new project will cost, but Phillips said the church has been raising money for the past 4 years.
“We don’t do debt, so we will pay cash for this. We’re continuously raising the money, but our church is super generous, and we believe we’ll have the money when it’s time,” said Phillips.
We’ll have more updates on this project as it develops over time.
