Seminary breaks ground on new chapel in Shawnee

Central Baptist Theological Seminary, 6601 Monticello Road, Shawnee, is celebrating an expansion project that includes the construction of a 160-seat chapel.

The facility will be named the Baugh-Marshall Chapel in honor of a $2 million gift the seminary received from The Baugh Family Foundation.

“(The Baughs) wanted to provide support to Central in the form of helping us build a new chapel,” Molly T. Marshall, seminary president, said.

The gift was part of Central’s Cultivating Excellence Capital Campaign, which has received almost $6.5 million in gifts and pledges since it started two years ago.

More than 300 people attended a Sept. 11 groundbreaking celebration for the new chapel.

“The groundbreaking was a wonderful, hopeful celebration,” Marshall said. “As we look to the future, it was a time of giving thanks for all that we have experienced along the way and a real sense of expectancy about the future.”

Marshall said she expects the chapel to be completed and operational in 2010.

“We anticipate having a dedication in mid-fall of next year,” she said.

The expansion project is about 5,000 square feet, which includes a breezeway, the chapel and additional space.

“Also, we’re reconfiguring about 8,000 square feet we already have for a new seminary library, so we really have two big projects under way,” Marshall said.

The chapel will serve two purposes – as a place for Journey Community Church to meet and a place for the seminary to worship.

“We need a place for worship, teaching classes, instructional space … it also will become home to a new Baptist church that will be planted in the building,” Marshall said. “It also will be a place for fine arts events and lectures. So we hope it will be very useful to the Shawnee community.”

Wallace Smith, Journey Community Church pastor, said having a place for the congregation to meet will be “fantastic.”

The newly formed church started in January 2008 and has been meeting on the seminary campus property for the last few months.

“We have weekly group meetings in homes, but we’ve been meeting (at the seminary) twice a month for worship,” Smith said. “We meet in the classroom and it’s just not very big. We have about 30 to 40 people and that’s about all we can have.”

Smith said his church is “outward focused” and being located within the seminary will help maintain that focus.

“As a church, we want to serve in the community. We’re volunteering already with places like TLC in Olathe and the Sunflower House,” he said. “By being hosted by the seminary and not having the building infrastructure over our heads, we get to maximize our outward focus. It’s just a wonderful gift for us to be able to do that.”

Smith said the partnership between the seminary and Journey Community Church will serve both.

“The hope is that we have seminary students that will work within our church … in essence, we would be a teaching church for them,” he said. “We can give the students a unique opportunity through internships to learn and to do new and different things. They’re allowing us to meet there and we’ll serve them by sharing our church. It’s a great all-around situation.”

For more information, visit www.cbts.edu.

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