Eagle Brook church hopes to expand to Woodbury

A megachurch already teeming with thousands of parishioners in three north metro cities wants to build a 1,500-seat campus in Woodbury to attract more people looking for a new congregation.

The new Eagle Brook church also would be home to hundreds of its current members who live in cities such as Woodbury, Oakdale, Lake Elmo and Hudson, Wis., and want a location closer to home, said Executive Pastor Scott Anderson.

Eagle Brook, which already attracts a weekly attendance of about 13,000 people, doesn't want to compete with other Woodbury churches, he said.

"We know what Eagle Brook tends to draw is people who don't attend a church," Anderson said. "It's certainly not our goal to take anyone from another church, ever."

Eagle Brook's proposal could go to the City Council within two months, said Melissa Douglas, a Woodbury city planner. The church, if approved, would be built on the city's east side near Hudson Road.

Eagle Brook also plans to build a new campus in Blaine that would seat 800 people. The church has campuses in White Bear Lake and Spring Lake Park, and its main campus in Lino Lakes seats 2,100.

The Woodbury master plan proposes eventual expansion of the proposed 75,000-square-foot church to 3,000 seats, Anderson said. The Lino Lakes campus would beam the "teaching" portion of worship in a video broadcast to the Woodbury church, he said.

Anderson said that Eagle Brook has a "Baptist heritage" but includes people from various other Protestant faiths, the Catholic Church, and people who had never before attended a church.

Studies show that about 70 percent of Twin Cities residents don't attend any church, and it's from those ranks that Eagle Brook would like to recruit new members.

Anderson said the Woodbury proposal is new enough that he couldn't put an accurate price tag on the construction, but he said that Eagle Brook hoped to open the new church within two years.

"We'd love for it to open now," he said. "Our campuses are just overflowing."

The church would be built on the southeast corner of Settlers Ridge Parkway and a new Eastview Road.

"It's very typical to locate churches in residential areas," she said.

Several existing churches in Woodbury already have seating for about 1,500 parishioners, Douglas said.

Scott Thumma, a Hartford Institute professor who authored the 2007 book, "Beyond Megachurch Myths," has written that megachurches are a relatively new phenomenon in America. Most of them opened in the past few decades, he said, and their mammoth size tends to attract even more people.

Megachurches also are known for their use of the arts -- dancing, drama, music and video presentations -- during worship services, Thumma wrote.