May 2010
A Vision for the Advocate Campus at Homestead and Merin
The Episcopal Church of the Advocate is hope-filled at the prospect of being located on the land at the northeast corner of Homestead and Merin Road. With 15 acres in the heart of a neighborhood that includes several non-profit services, including transitional housing for women and for men, a high school, a senior center, the human services center for the southern part of the County, as well as the highly anticipated Carolina North campus, the Advocate looks forward to providing a place of worship, contemplation, and collaborative ministry — a resource in and for north Chapel Hill. Our vision for the campus is to maintain a creative tension between providing a place where people can come away from the busy-ness of their lives to be restored, and providing a place where people can come in order to engage more fully in the community and world in which we live.
We are a congregation committed to social justice, environmental sustainability, and good neighborliness. Our hope is to construct and begin worship in the Welcome Center and Chapel on the site by Easter 2012. This chapel will seat 100 people and will serve as our primary place of worship for the following 3-5 years or more. In the long run, we have plans to build a Worship Center, or Church, on the site, which will seat up to 200 people. We see fully the blessing of being a church community where people know one another. To that end, we do not intend to become a large church. Once we have grown to 450-500 people, with average Sunday attendance of 250-300 people spread across two or three services., we anticipate working to establish another new church somewhere in Durham or Orange County.
The long term vision for the Advocate campus includes space for several other possible resources — a retreat center, a non-profit center, a residence for an intentional community of 8-16 people, a library with a focus on justice and the spiritual life, and a place for collaboration among people an organizations working to address injustices in our region and state.
Plans for all of these things are still evolving. We invite others — from within the Episcopal Church, from the non-profit sector, from the social entrepreneur movement and beyond — to join with us in dreaming the dream. For further information, or to get involved, contact: seniorwarden@theadvocatechurch.org.
Here are some images of the Site Plan, and the proposed floorplan for Building One: A Welcome Center and Chapel.
