Father Andrew Rowell, associate rector of evangelism and discipleship at St. Peter’s, said the congregation is building a home for the future.

“When you look at St. Peter’s from the air, it’s a cross laid out on the ground,” Rowell said “It’s a stamp of the message of the gospel in building form.”

The new building, which should be open for Sunday services by mid-May, is prominent while driving down Thomasville Road. The church is built in the style of a Gothic cathedral. The building faces east. There are three towers, 24 spires and five Celtic crosses on the church. Inside, a 700-pound crucifix, designed by parishioner Robert Mullins, hangs between the pews and the pulpit.

Bradley Touchstone, the architect for the building, called the project “amazingly complex.”

“We did a tremendous amount of work with the congregation to understand very clearly what their goals were, what kind of worship space they wanted to create and what sort of tradition they wanted to build into this church,” he said.

Touchstone said the building will be able to seat between 700 and 1,000 people.

“We’ve taken less than two years to complete this building, which is an enormously aggressive schedule,” he said. “Childers Construction has done a fantastic job. They hit the ground running and were able to mobilize tremendous manpower to get this done in less than two years.”

Along with excitement surrounding its new church home, Rowell said he has fielded questions about the church. In February, the church’s rector, Father Eric Dudley, published a series of frequently asked questions about the new church to the St. Peter’s website. One response addressed questions about the expense of building such an elaborate church.

Dudley wrote, “We are building something that will last for many generations, and raise up a strong Christian presence in this city that not only will do much more for the poor over the course of those generations, but will have a significant impact on the moral, spiritual, and emotional life of this city.”

Tallahassee’s poor and underserved will benefit from a strong, faith-based community, Rowell said. The new church is a place for people to be transformed by faith, he said, and those who are touched by the gospel will go out and do good deeds.

“Yes, we could give that money to the poor and it would be useful for a very short period of time,” he said. “You can imagine that money is a drop in the bucket given the needs of the poor in a town like Tallahassee. And we’re sensitive to that. But also, we need a home in which to worship the lord.”

Local nonprofits and charitable agencies in the city typically work with far less than $7 million, said Pat Holliday, human services manager for the city.

“There’s a tremendous need here right now,” she said. “We’ve got a poverty rate of about 22 percent, which means almost one person out of every four lives in poverty. For me, I would love to have money. We used to have a budget of about $6 million until the economy went bad and donations to United Way of the Big Bend went south.”

Rowell said St. Peter’s frequently tries to assist the poor by organizing mission trips to places like Cuba, Uganda and Guatemala.

“A tenth of our operating budget goes to local, nationwide and foreign missions,” Rowell said.

The church, Rowell said, is a testament to the congregation’s faith in God, not a monument meant to glorify St. Peter’s.

“We’ve watched God do an amazing thing,” he said. “We knew when we got our first building we were going to need more space. The signs were there that this was something that was going to grow. And it has. It has grown tremendously.”

St. Peter’s Anglican Church began in 2005 after about 700 parishioners from St. John’s Episcopal Church left due to differences over how to interpret Scripture. A final — and highly publicized — straw came when Episcopalians nationwide recognized a gay bishop. Since then, St. Peter’s has grown to about 1,600 active members in Tallahassee.

Those members are dedicated to the church, Rowell said. The congregation raised more than $7 million to assist with the construction of the church. Those who didn’t donate funds donated time and skills. Mullins spent nearly two years carving the church’s crucifix.

“As Anglicans, we don’t worship crucifixes,” Mullins said. “The crucifix is to remind people of what our lord Jesus Christ did for us in the crucifixion. It’s a remembrance, putting back together those memories. It’s not to be worshiped, it’s not to be venerated — it’s a reminder.”

The church will not be ready for Easter Sunday on April 20. However Rowell said he’s looking forward to opening the doors for service soon after that.

“All I can say is to worship with us,” he said. “I think if people worship at St. Peter’s, perhaps they’ll experience something that maybe will deflect some presumptions. We’re humbled by the fact that God’s called us into relationship with him. We’re not, as some people might assume, building this grand building for our own glory.”

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About St. Peter's

St. Peters Anglican Church is a member of the world-wide Anglican Communion and is a founding church in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). St. Peter’s was begun on October 9, 2005, when a group of Episcopalians from St. John’s Episcopal Church, Tallahassee, chose to follow God’s lead to separate from the Episcopal Church in America because of its severely diminished respect for the role of Holy Scripture in the life of the Church, and its deeply compromised witness to the Gospel.

While we are not biblical literalists or fundamentalists, we are Christians in the classical tradition of Anglicanism, taking seriously both the authority of Holy Scripture, and the uniqueness of the person of Christ. We are, therefore, a new Church in a very old tradition. It is the call of St. Peter’s to seek with love and humility to witness to the hope and joy found only in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We have two services of worship in traditional form, and a third service, true to the Prayer Book but more contemporary in style. We place a high priority on Bible study, youth, children’s, and college and young adult ministries, and mission. The people who have formed this church have been so clear in their convictions that they have been willing to uproot their families, sacrifice their comforts, and risk for the sake of the Gospel of our Lord.

Our current location, while wonderful in many ways, is temporary. Construction of our new church on Thomasville Road north of Interstate 10 is underway and we plan to move in April 2014! Being a new church, our doors are wide open to all who love God, take seriously the truth of His Word, and enjoy the rich tradition of classical Anglicanism. We are a warm and welcoming parish and would love to have you visit.

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