More News

Members of Seneca Creek Community Church celebrated the congregation's 20th anniversary Sunday by not coming to services.

About 420 volunteers marked the occasion by doing service projects in the Germantown area such as preparing meals for the homeless, writing letters to servicemen and women stationed overseas and collecting Christmas presents and winter clothing for residents of an American Indian reservation in North Dakota.

"We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what would be unique but fit with who we are as a church," said Executive Pastor Jeannette Cochran, who added that service will remain a focus for the next 12 months. "We thought the best way to celebrate and mark this day was to serve others and give back to the community."

Volunteers had collected a trailer of food — about 100 bags — for Germantown Help as of Monday morning, Cochran said. Congregants hope to fill a second trailer when they finish collecting bags from neighborhoods. And about 70 people spent the day cleaning and repairing homes of two Germantown families headed by disabled single mothers.

"It was awesome to have all these people come out and help," said church member Jose Perez of Germantown, organizer of the home repair projects. "It was unbelievable."

Seneca Creek held its first meeting Oct. 15, 1989, at the former Loews theater in the Germantown Commons Shopping Center, a storefront now occupied by DSW Shoe Warehouse. About 85 people, mostly family and friends of the church's founders, took in a sermon between movie screenings, and dividers in the hallway separated a group of older youths from the nursery school-aged children.

Sunday services at Seneca Valley High School now average 700 attendees.

"I think [meeting in the theater] actually helped us because the people who we were trying to connect with were the people who weren't necessarily coming to church," said Lead Pastor Mark Tindle, co-founder of Seneca Creek with seminary classmate Bruce Johnson, who resigned in 2005. "What the theater did was provide a neutral ground, a safe place. They didn't feel love when they were walking into God's house."

Seneca Creek has met in a variety of rented spaces over the years — including schools, a community Center, the Sugarloaf Shopping Center in Germantown and a tent in a parking lot — and has been hauling two trailers and several box trucks of equipment to create a makeshift sanctuary at Seneca Valley High every Sunday for the last nine years. The church is remodeling an office building at 13 Firstfield Road in Gaithersburg that will be its permanent home.

"The long-term success rate of churches is not good because it takes a lot of factors coming together. Ultimately God has to show up in this kind of adventure, and God has opened a lot of doors and brought in a lot of happy people over the years," Tindle said. "...To me, I feel like the work has just begun. There's so much more that this church can do and needs to do."