COASTAL OBSERVER

Pawleys Island Community Church is bursting at the seams and recently unveiled a $6.75 million expansion plan.

“Our church is very grateful it’s growing and we’ve added a lot of new people in the last year-and-a-half,” the Rev. Don Williams, the church pastor, said. “We just really have run out of space.”

Planning for the expansion project, which is called “Make Room,” started about three years ago. 

“You want to make sure you’re doing the right thing,” Williams said. 

Not only is the project designed to accommodate more people, but also new ministries, Williams added. 

“I’m very excited to see what it can do for all the ministries that we have and to see the buildings fill up,” he said. 

Tom Curtis, an architect with Grace, Hebert, Curtis Architects in Dallas, designed the project. Curtis did a lot of work for Tidelands Health and attended services at the community church while in the area.

The first part of the project will include expanding the foyer of the church’s worship center. Williams said people jokingly call the narrow foyer a “cattle shoot,” because it gets crowded quickly when people are leaving the first service at the same time people are arriving for the second service. 

The project will widen the area near the doors by a few feet.

The expansion of the foyer could start as soon as September and includes the addition of a coffee bar.

“We just want to have some space for people to hang out,” Williams said. “It’s going to be a nice place for people to be able to gather and build a community.”

The church does not plan to close the worship center during construction, although there could be some “inconvenience,” as people are asked to use an alternate entrance, Williams said. 

The project will continue with construction of a 6,100-square-foot pavilion in the field next to the building that houses the church’s offices. The structure will include a cement floor and garage doors the end facing the field near the chapel.

“It’s going to be very cool,” Williams said. “It will have an indoor/outdoor kind of a feeling.”

Williams said the facility will mostly be used by students, but can also accommodate other groups, like the men’s breakfast, that are too small for the worship center.

“If you don’t have at least 300 people in there, it feels like no one showed up,” Williams said. 

Work on the new building is scheduled to start in January.

The project also includes a 5,350-square-foot expansion of the annex, which is attached to the worship center. The new space will include a family worship room for parents of young children, a large nursery, meeting rooms, and a command center for the church’s life safety team with direct access to the balcony of the worship center.

The final phase will extend the back wall of the worship center to allow more room for storage, production equipment and meetings.

“Right now it’s not very pleasant, and there’s not much room,” Williams said.

Once the phase is complete the church’s two production booths, which are currently located in front of the stage, will be consolidated and moved behind the stage. Moving the booths will allow for approximately 50 more chairs to be added.

The church added 92 new members last year and Williams said the second service on Sundays is near capacity. The expansion project should allow people who can’t find a seat in the worship center to watch a live stream of the service in another area of the campus.

The church started broadcasting its services during the pandemic and found that it was reaching people across the country.

Williams said between 300 and 400 people tune in each week. Some of them are local, including at the Lakes at Litchfield, Arbor Landing at Pawleys assisted living facilities and the county jail, but many are people who discovered the church while visiting the area.

“This is all God. This is not me that they’re looking at,” he added. “People just like our church.”

The church’s attendance – including in-person and online – has now surpassed what it was before the pandemic, Williams added.

“I don’t feel we’re really doing anything all that different as a church. It’s just but something’s in the water, something’s stirring here and people are coming,” Williams said. “It’s just very exciting and humbling at the same time.”

Work on the expansion project is expected to take about 18 months. 

“It’s cool to sit back and watch what God is doing expanding and growing our church family,” Williams said. “It’s a good thing.”

Williams, who has been pastor of the community church for 25 years, is “very grateful” that church members have already pledged enough money to cover the cost of the project.

“I believe in three years we will be able to pay it off,” he said.