Restoration of Lord of Life Lutheran Church
St. Simons Island, GA

It started with a vision and the gift of music. That's how the members of Lord of Life Lutheran came to restore its sanctuary.  Originally built in 1929, this small Spanish-style mission church had housed three different denominations when, in 1988, a small group of Lutherans celebrated their first worship service as a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Flash forward to 2009--a member gives a gift in memory of his wife; but you see, this was to be a gift of music, a pipe organ. So a committee was formed (we are Lutheran after all) and discussions began. 

Much needed to be done to prepare the sanctuary for this addition.  The sound in the sanctuary was not good.  The committee decided to bring in an audio specialist to review the sound issues and to let us know whether or not an organ in that space would even work.  We also enlisted the talents of a member who was an architect to begin a basic design that we could use with additional fundraising.  We realized that a project of this magnitude would take a number of years, so we developed a timeline to include phases for the restoration.  

There were a number of things to consider as we moved ahead.  Our church is historic and while we wanted a functional building we did not want to sacrifice the historic fabric. We also knew that it was going to cost more than the gift itself; our congregation, as a whole, needed to believe in the project.  But most of all, this project, like all the others done by our congregation, needed to be done to the Glory of God. 

Today, Phase II is just about complete with other phases to follow.   There is no doubt that our little church has had a varied past and continues to have an active present.  The one thing we can all agree on is that this restoration has helped us understand our past while encouraging us to look to our future.  It has helped us secure a future for generations to come and to continue worship and praise to the Glory to God.