This isn't your typical church expansion

July 19, 2023

It’s typical when a parish adds on to a church to push out a side wall or back wall to add more seating.

Not at Sacred Heart Church in Woodbine.

For a renovation and expansion the parish had in mind, the church was literally split in half and pulled apart.

Before the snow flies, it’s hoped new classrooms in the basement will be completed, a new addition in the center of the two existing halves of the church will be built, and a connection between the church and the parish hall will be constructed. 
The parish is doing more than just building a structure, though. It’s also building stronger relationships in the community, said builder Todd Heistand. 

“We’ve got a lot of volunteers from Woodbine who have been helping from digging the holes to hauling things in, and standing up the steel trusses,” he said.  

The innovative project can be completed thanks to the local share of the Ignite! capital campaign, the volunteers who are helping, and a desire to do something special for the parish’s 120th anniversary.

Since the church needed some long-overdue exterior work done, the parish consulted with parishioner Heistand, who has a company that takes old historic buildings like offices and warehouses and converts them to apartments that he and his wife, Mary, manage. Heistand heard the church plans and said, “Why stop there?”

They dreamed big.

The classrooms in the basement of the church were barely bigger than closets, said Father Joel McNeil, the pastor. 
And the church, which seated 100 comfortably, needed more room. Heistand said his four daughters had their weddings in Dunlap because their hometown church was too small. 

The parish also imagined a connecting corridor between the church and the parish hall that sits right next to the church. 
Father McNeil once visited a church that was built in the early 1900s, like Sacred Heart. When that community grew in the 1930s, they cut the church in half, pulled it apart ,and filled in the middle. Father McNeil asked Heistand if that could be done with Sacred Heart Church. 

It’s an unusual approach, Heistand said, but it makes sense given Sacred Heart has no space on either side to expand. On one side is the street and on the other side is the parish hall.

 With the church split in half, it was easier to access the basement for the renovation there, said Father McNeil. It wasn’t hard to move half of the church because it sat on beams rather than a concrete pad. 

“When the house movers came, they joked and said this is the only time they’ve moved half a house,” he said. 

In addition to the classrooms and seating for about 100 more people in the church, the worship space is getting new siding, new roofing, an upgraded electrical system, and new air conditioning. 

When the parish came to the diocesan Building Commission for approval for the project, it was challenged to ensure that the facility was accessible for the disabled. Given space constraints, a long ramp wasn’t feasible and an elevator will be installed in another phase of development. 

Architect Rick Emswiler, who helped design the new parish classroom space at St. Mary Church in Hamburg, designed a ramp that has 90-degree angles going around the space where a low-use, limited application elevator will eventually be installed. The LULA elevator is cheaper than a commercial-use elevator, Heistand said.

“They came up with a good solution,” said Father McNeil.

Heistand and his wife, who was the sister to the late Father Tom Coenen, grew up in Woodbine, and they raised their family there. 

“It’s such a cool historic little church,” he said. “We wanted to make sure it didn’t look any different once the expansion was in.”