Moses Lake Adventist Church finished after 20-plus years

MOSES LAKE — After decades of fundraising, labor and repeated setbacks, the Moses Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church building is finally complete.

“It was miracle after miracle,” said Hugh Thomas, a member of the church’s building committee.

The building, located on West Valley Road across from the Grant County Fairgrounds, was mostly complete in October 2024, but one last piece remained: the sanctuary. Sabbath services were instead held in the large waiting area outside the sanctuary, which was roped off and inaccessible. April 25 marked the first time services could actually be held inside the sanctuary, and about 120 people came to celebrate.

The building has been a work in progress, one way or another, for more than 20 years. The original Seventh-day Adventist Church was located downtown at Fifth Avenue and Division Street, where the Grant Transit Authority multimodal facility is now. The church sold that building in 2006 and began to hold services in Crestview Christian School, which is a ministry of the church, while planning a full church building on the same property. The shell of the building went up in 2010, Thomas said, and almost immediately the money ran dry and the construction stalled until 2014. The wake-up call, Thomas said, was a 450-foot retaining wall.

“We had a bid for $75,000, and a few of us got together and said, ‘I think we can do it cheaper.’ And … we did it for under $8,000.”

In 2016, the committee decided to pave the shared parking lot between the church and the school.

“A miracle happened,” Thomas said. “The bid was astronomical for the asphalt, but in exactly that year, (the city of Moses Lake) paved Valley Road, and we let them park their equipment here. Whenever they had more loads of asphalt, they did our parking lot, so we got it underpriced.”

The church kitchen was another stumbling block that was removed from their path, Thomas said.

We were told at first we did not have to put a grease trap into our kitchen, then we had to put a grease trap in,” he said. “We decided to put the grease trap in on Thanksgiving Day. We’re in the backhoe digging away next to the kitchen area way below the foundation and the foundation starts giving way. I suddenly call (Jim Morgan at) M1 tanks. I’m like, ‘Jim, I need a tank, and I need it now.’ … He ran down to M1, grabbed a big cement tank, a 1,000-gallon tank, and dropped it in there so we can not lose (the foundation).”

Time and again, Building Committee member Ben Altrogg said, the cost of the building was whittled down, with donated supplies that came in at just the right time and contractors willing to discount their work.

“Every time we pressed forward in faith, the Lord provided,” Altrogg said at the church’s celebration of the new sanctuary April 25. “Any time we held back because we didn’t know what we were going to do, the blessings stopped almost immediately. So what I remember the most is (that) it was better to step in faith than it was to sit in fear.”

Meanwhile, there were still expenses to be met. The church held garage sales in the parking lot, using items donated not only by congregants but by others in the community. Those sales raised between $10,000 and $20,000, church member Judy Twigg said.

“They’d start out as a few days, and then they got so popular … they started lasting for one to two weeks,” Twigg said. “People in the community donated some things, and) the community rallied to come to every sale. We’d put up signs on the corner of Valley Road saying, ‘Garage sale,’ and people would flock in.”

Anonymous matching grants defrayed much of the cost as well, said former Pastor Clinton Meharry, who led the church from 2012 to 2024.

“Quite a number of times different individuals offered to give a significant amount … and that gave the members and friends an incentive that if we donate, it doubles our money,” Meharry said.

“I bet you this church matched over 10 times, anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000,” Thomas said. “It was amazing, God pouring out his blessing. When somebody would come up with a gift, the church would match it very quickly, and another one would come, and another and another and another, and it still spilled over.”

The new sanctuary has a capacity of 300 people, considerably larger than the church’s regular Sunday attendance. It’s an open two-level design with a main stage area and upstairs a second stage, sound booth and catwalk for access.

“We do not want people to come in here and say, ‘Ugh, this church,’” Thomas said. “We want people to come into this church and say, ‘There is God in this church.’”

    The final step in the Moses Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church’s more than 20-year building odyssey was the sanctuary, which opened April 25.