GILROY
– Bursting at the seams of its former 6,000-square-foot
location, the New Hope Community Church has been holding Sunday
services across the street in the senior center’s cafeteria for the
past eight years.
GILROY – Bursting at the seams of its former 6,000-square-foot location, the New Hope Community Church has been holding Sunday services across the street in the senior center’s cafeteria for the past eight years.
Of course, this has entailed extensive setting up and taking down each week of equipment, chairs, and sound system, etc. But on Sept. 7, a dream that has been in the hearts of its parishioners for nearly 30 years finally came to fruition as a caravan of cars met at Sixth and Hanna streets, where the church has stood since 1927.
As the caravan crossed the vast Red Sea (Monterey Road), they entered the Promised Land of New Hope’s brand new 12,500-square-foot building on the corner of Muraoka and Yamane Drive. The lead car carried the church’s longest-serving pastor, Don MacMurray, whose purchase of 10 acres of land in the 1970s made the new location possible. He was followed by Rhonda and Randy Chantler (grandson of one of the 1923 charter founders of the church) and by Juanita and Howard Schuler, members of the church longer than anyone else, belonging since 1946 for a total of 57 years.
“It was kind of exciting,” Juanita Schuler said, “riding with balloons on the car!”
Schuler is part of a women’s prayer group that has been meeting for more than 25 years. When she recently suffered a crushed shoulder, the doctor asked if she had any relatives close by who could care for her.
“No,” she said, “They all live out of town…but I do have a church family.”
The doctor looked at her and replied, “Sometimes that’s the best kind.”
Church members have supplied her with food and so many floral arrangements that she that she had to assure her neighbors that no one had died.
New Hope is all about community. Whether serving seniors, families with small children, youth, the Hispanic community or helping to start (along with the Rotary Club) a bone marrow drive that has become one of the largest of its kind in the country, it is this determination to be a force for good in the Gilroy community that inspires New Hope’s vision to continue to grow and reach out.
Senior Pastor MacPhail also serves as Gilroy’s police chaplain, on-call 24 hours a day for making death notifications, working with families and counseling officers (a much needed service as nearly twice as many police officers die from suicide than from being killed in the line of duty).
With a congregation that is 40 percent Hispanic and 60 percent non-Hispanic, New Hope is involved in outreaches to high schools, holding anti-drug/anti-gang campaigns at student assemblies. They also bring programs to areas made up of lower income housing, hosting pancake breakfasts and putting on children’s puppet shows.
Leukemia survivor, police chaplain and now senior pastor at New Hope Community Church for 12 years, Pastor MacPhail’s philosophy is very practical: “If we preach it on Sunday, it should work on Monday.”
As far as the future, Pastor MacPhail plans for a 25,000-square-foot New Hope building.
“This is just our interim facility,” he explained. “We expect to outgrow this one, too.”
And with so much community involvement, that dream may one day come true.
Beginning at 10:45 a.m. Sunday, Pastor MacPhail has invited the Gilroy Mayor Tom Springer and the public on a grand tour of the 14 classrooms, nursing mothers’ room (a beautiful room with comfortable furniture, including a rocking chair), kitchen and sanctuary which seats 299 people.
There will be a formal dedication ceremony and a reception following. For more information, contact the church office at 842-4857.
When asked if she felt strange about moving to a new building, Juanita Schuler said of the New Hope community
“I’ve been here so long that it just feels like home.”
