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Pastor Walter Smith doesn’t think there was imitation either way, but his Abundant Life Assembly of God congregation committed itself to an inner city location several years ago – much like its sister congregation, the Pleasant Valley Assembly of God.
In the case of Abundant Life, the commitment was to the poor neighborhood northwest of UPMC Altoona, where the congregation took over the former Fourth Lutheran Church building at Third Street and Howard Avenue.
In the case of Pleasant Valley Assembly, the commitment was to a poor neighborhood southeast of the hospital, where the congregation has created a worship center and various services under the umbrella of the Nehemiah Project, centered around 16th Street and 11th Avenue.
On Thursday, the Abundant Life decision played to a close when Logan Township supervisors rescinded a 2004 developers agreement by which Abundant Life was to build a church on spacious grounds near Oak Avenue and 51st Street.
The rescission of the developers agreement will allow a family to build a home there.
The rescission also represents the church’s change of heart – an epiphany of sorts – that happened when the Lutheran congregation was dissolving in 2010, and its church complex became available.
It was actually an easy decision, and a “prophetic” one, on more than one level, according to Smith.
The approximately 40-year-old church complex itself, which the congregation bought for $1 in 2010, was far more than Abundant Life could have afforded to build from scratch in the suburban location, the six-lot former “Wissinger Park,” he said.
The church was also in the same neighborhood where Abundant Life began in a storefront-like setting at Cricket Field Plaza in the mid-1990s, he said.
“Kind of like coming home,” Smith said.
Most important, it was in the heart of an area where its 225-person sanctuary, gym, kitchen, 14 classrooms and offices could help people who really need it, according to Smith.
“More conducive to the mission,” Smith said.
Especially because there are many young families in the neighborhood, said Sandra Kurtz, a real estate agent who attended the township proceedings on Thursday with Smith.
At the former Lutheran building, Abundant Life operates a food bank that last year served 6,000 people, a clothing bank and a youth group that includes about 55 teens, Smith said.
Selling the old Wissinger Park property will not only provide a family the site for its new home but eliminate the need for church maintenance of the ground and the paying of property tax, Smith said.
The property tax was due because the ground was not being used in the service of the church mission, he said.
The church moved to the Lutheran building from a storefront in the former Wissinger shopping center on 31st Street.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.