Megachurch sets up in Woodbury high school

With hardly a prayer of building a new church in a struggling economy, a huge east-metro congregation will start weekend services in September at Woodbury's East Ridge High School.

Eagle Brook hasn't abandoned plans for a worship center in the city's northeast corner but will have to delay construction on the 40.5-acre site until the economy improves, Executive Pastor Scott Anderson said.

"We have lots of dreams," he said. "We're just blessed to take small steps forward."

The megachurch, which has campuses in Lino Lakes, White Bear Lake, Spring Lake Park and Blaine, will start services Sept. 10 in the Woodbury high school's auditorium. Two services will be held on Saturdays and two on Sundays, the same as at Eagle Brook's other campuses.

Eagle Brook has received city approval to build a 1,500-seat worship center, which will include a community gathering space, a children's worship area and classrooms. The two-story building planned at Settlers Ridge Parkway and Brookview Road would cost $20 million to $25 million, Anderson said last week.

Eagle Brook will pay more than $200,000 a year to rent space at East Ridge, Anderson said. Doing so will establish the Woodbury congregation and relieve overcrowding at Eagle Brook's other churches, which now draw as many as 16,000 people to services on weekends.

Anderson said he expected about 500 to 800 people to attend the first services in Woodbury. The school auditorium has a capacity of 940.

Eagle Brook recently opened a new campus in Blaine, a $10 million project that cost about twice what was originally planned because of land purchases, Scott Anderson said. That expense contributed to the construction delay in Woodbury, he said.

Eagle Brook hopes to start building its Woodbury church in the fall of 2012. A three-year rental contract with the high school will be reviewed annually, he said.

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

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

Services at East Ridge will be held at 4:05 p.m. and 6:05 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 10, and at 9:05 a.m. and 11:05 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 11. Times will remain the same on successive weekends.

The size of a new Eagle Brook church would rival several churches in Woodbury that already have seating for about 1,500 parishioners, said Melissa Douglas, a city planner.

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.

Kevin Giles • 651-925-5037, Twitter: @stribgiles