CHRIST THE KING Capital Campaign
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August 2023 Update
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Coming Together
The new Church building will consist of a majority-brick exterior, with a large plaza in front of it. We hope that this area will become a center of life for all our parishioners (like a village square), where people from all over will meet and step into a holy space. We want to commission a statue of Christ the King, who will extend His arms in welcome to all who come to Him. The advantage of this campus design is that it will ecnourage foot traffic while keeping parishioners and visitors safe from vehicular traffic. One of the early designers compared the campus to Washington, DC, with a "beltway ring" around the exterior of the campus and a "national mall-style" central focus of life. With the church in the center of the campus, we will show that all our life revolves around our encoutner with the Lord in the Sacraments.
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An Integrated Campus
One of the benefits of building a new Church at our Dorsey Road site is that it will place all of the activity of our parish at one place. At one address on Dorsey Road - convenient to both Glen Burnie and the I-97 corridor - we will give home to our School, Parish Offices, meeting spaces, and Church. Parish leadership and the architects have worked together to design a Church and campus that will share a similar asthetic, while also marking the new building as a Church, dedicated to the worship of God and an encoutner with Jesus. Additionally, having a Church right here will benefit the School, as the children can now celebrate their regular Masses next door, at the Church that they can see from their classrooms. This will enhance the Catholic identity of Msgr. Slade School, which already instills the Faith in our young people and their families.
Having one campus will also benefit us financially, as our "footprint" reduces from several parish campuses to one, thus lightening our property insurance and maitenance costs.
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Community Space
When designing our new church building, we recognized the importance of our "social spaces." Our Parish Hall has serves us well, hosting many events and activities - almost every day of the week! The new building will offer us a large narthex (lobby to the church), as well as a new social hall that can be further divided into tow separate spaces to accommodate two groups at once when necessary. The new Hall will also feature a warming kitchen to provide space to serve food for various events. Imagine the fellowship that we can host every weekend!
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"Under One Roof"
The "Under One Roof" capital campaign is Christ the King Parish's fundraising drive towards our new church building on the Dorsey Road campus. In the 1950's, Monsignor Arthur Slade, pastor of Holy Trinity Church, realized that the 250-seat church on B&A Boulevard was too small to continue to accommodate the growing parish community. At the time, Holy Trinity was the largest parish in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. We had just opened a new school on new property on Dorsey Road, and Msgr. Slade saw an opportunity to build a new, larger church building there as well. However, with the onset of Vatican II and the new directions advocated by the pastoral council and the diocese, it was decided that the large parish should rather be divided into smaller ones around the area.
For 50 years, that solution worked, but as communities moved and the number of available priests dwindled. The upkeep and support of these multiple parishes became more burdensome. Additionally, in the past 20 years, our Spanish-speaking community has grown immensely. Today, almost 70% of our parish speaks Spanish! Again, the burden of a smaller worship space and more people presents us with a challenge. Our solution is to design and construct a new church which will sit together with our school and parish center and serve the greater Glen Burnie community.
The "Under One Roof" campaign has set a goal of $1.5 million to assist us in reaching the goal of builing a new church. Together with the sales of various parish properties, we hope to garner the funds to build a place worthy of our call to unified Catholic worship - a place where families and parishioners can gather to praise God and to build a commuity of faith, hope, and charity.
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