Mega-Church Plans 40-Acre Campus Expansion

The most visible part of Irvine’s mega-church expansion plan is a quaint, New England-style chapel, perched on a hilltop and surrounded by cottonwoods, Southern magnolias and California pepper trees.

The building--something out of a Vermont postcard--is intended to give the project a “churchy” feel. Without that nod to tradition, Mariners Church’s sprawling 10-year building project across 40 acres in Irvine might be mistaken for a college campus or small town, complete with park and lake.

Down the hill from the chapel, plans call for a 4,000-seat worship center with an outdoor amphitheater, a “community hub” with coffeehouse, food court, bookstore and library, and a two-story youth center with roll-up garage doors, jumbo video screens and a rock-climbing wall.

If approved by the Irvine Planning Commission tonight, the nearly 500,000 square feet of building space (which include 170,000 square feet of existing space) will give Mariners one of the largest church campuses in Southern California.

The price tag for the expansion hasn’t been tallied, church leaders said, though the first of an anticipated three phases will cost $50 million.

“Our dream is to create a one-of-a-kind spiritual center for every day of the week, not just Sundays,” said Senior Pastor Kenton Beshore, who presides over an average of 4,500 worshipers each weekend. “We can imagine [people] dropping into the coffeehouse to meet friends and hear live music or take their lunch hour by a quiet lake. We want to create a safe refuge for our kids to hang out, listen to music, meet friends.”

Mega-church campuses tend to mirror the secular community with a Christian flavor, said Scott Thumma, a professor with Hartford Seminary’s Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut. He has studied these large, full-service churches for a dozen years.

“The trend for mega-churches is to create a whole alternative environment for their members where they walk into a garden of paradise of sorts,” Thumma said.

The Mariners’ chapel, designed for weddings and smaller services, will serve as the church’s visible icon.

When completed, the campus with its half-a-million square feet of building space will rival any found at America’s 600 or so mega-churches (defined as having more than 2,000 worshipers per weekend).

Suburban Chicago’s Willow Creek, the granddaddy of the mega-churches with a weekly attendance of 17,000, far more than Mariners’ 4,500, has 352,000 square feet of space on 155 acres with another large building under construction.

Mariners received nearly $18 million in member pledges during its initial round of fund-raising.

During the first phase of Mariners’ expansion, church leaders will complete the purchase of 16 acres of adjacent land, construct the youth center and the building for its children’s ministry (which features a two-story slide), and will buy land off-campus in nearby Santa Ana to expand an inner-city learning center for disadvantaged families.

Ground could be broken within the next six months, church officials said.

The worship center--double the size of Mariners’ existing sanctuary--a 3,500-space parking structure and amphitheater will be built during phase two. The current 1,900-seat sanctuary is to be converted into an atrium office.