October 26, 2004
LifeBridge’s Church City Version 2.0
Tonight and for the next 2 nights, the LifeBridge Church is holding open houses to discuss their new and updated plans for building a mega-city behind my house. I went over with some neighbors. The presentation was put on by some of the hired planners — no church members in sight. Here is one of the diagrams. The red arrows points to my house.
LifeBridge has changed their plans from before — for the worse. Instead of a nice buffer between the neighborhoods, they have now filled the area with very dense housing on the scale of 8 homes per acre! That is California living…why do this in the middle of spacious Colorado? The lots in our neighborhood (including open space) average about 1 - 1.5 per acre. That isn’t compatible. Each of those grey sections between streets has 6 to 8 2-story homes in them.
Here were some of the illustrations of how nice the area will be. No illustrations of the 5,000 car parking lot and the member all trying to get out of it after Sunday morning service. For perspective, the mall in our town doesn’t even have a 5,000 car capacity.
Naturally, all the larger home are built up and away from the church near the lake to the North. 2 of the county roads are being “re-aligned” to make room for the 6,000 seat church.
The good news in this is that LifeBridge has to go through the zoning process again because this plan is so radically different than previous plans. I believe that the legal appeal filed by my neighbors and I was a large time setback for the church. So maybe they decided to go around the wait on the appeal and just do a new zoning process. If they lose the appeal, they have to go through the zoning process again anyway. So why wait? This is good news because we now live to plead our case again — and this time we will be louder. Even some neighbors that were previously a fan of the development have now switched sides due to the radical changes.
Another interesting development over the past few months is the approval of a Super Wal*Mart going in right by LifeBridge’s current location. Prior to this, the church’s hands were tied by the city of Longmont because they were not allowed to grow in their current location. Since then, that has changed and the city is actively developing that area in a big way. The area is going to be revamped to be able to handle the new Wal*Mart’s traffic and other impacts, such as drainage. So what a great thing for the church — build your massive church by the massive Wal*Mart. It is compatible with the surroundings! The infrastructure can support it. Why build in a corn field outside of town? Doesn’t make sense anymore. Oh, maybe it is because the church developers have personally purchased all the land around the new church site and they would lose a good deal of money on that land now.
LifeBridge often prints that this new church site “is part of God’s Will”. Maybe they should take a step back. Maybe this legal lawsuit, the appeal, the change of zoning at the current location, and the improvements in infrastructure by introduction of a Wal*Mart near the church’s current site is all part of God’s plan. Maybe that is truely God’s Will? Religion is a dangerous thing — all believers think God is on their side, even Osama says he is doing “God’s Will”.
