For nearly two months, members of St. John Baptist Church, in Columbia, have been settling into a new building and growing excited about ways the congregation will affect the community outside its walls.

"We are in a state of celebration," said the Rev. Robert Turner, who has been senior pastor of the congregation for 16 years. Members held their first worship service Sept. 27 in the new facility at 9055 Tamar Drive, in Long Reach.

The church's new location was the result of a 2007 land swap between the church and the Howard County Public School System. The school system traded a 10-acre site it owned off Tamar Drive, along with $1.7 million, to St. John Baptist Church, in exchange for a 41-acre site the church owned at the intersection of Route 40 and Marriottsville Road, in Ellicott City.

The church built a one-story 30,000-square-foot sanctuary and fellowship hall on the Columbia site, while school officials eyed the Marriottsville Road land as a potential site for a future middle school.

"The process was challenging, but the new church construction executive committee team that we had representing the church did a phenomenal job," Turner said.

Before moving to its new home, the church held worship services in a business park on Old Annapolis Road, and prior to that at Atholton High School and at its original location in the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center.

The church was founded in 1971 at the Wilde Lake Interfaith Center. The congregation left the center in 1997, seeking a larger worship area.

"Now we have more space to do more for our members and our community," Turner said.

With the move into the new facility out of the way, Turner said he is eager to "roll out a new initiative in the beginning of the year." He would not elaborate.

Overall, he said, church members want to find ways of doing "more for families and more for children and youth."

"We want our church to be a place where people can come together for inspiration, instruction, fun and fellowship," he said.

The congregation consists of 900 families and is always growing, Turner said.

In a way, the congregation already has outgrown its new building.

"Our current sanctuary is not large enough to accommodate everyone," Turner said. "We have an overflow space in our fellowship hall."

The sanctuary seats around 600 and the fellowship hall can seat around 500. Services are held at 8 and 10:45 a.m. Sundays. An additional service might be added in the future, Turner said.

"Now we have a major responsibility to use the facility as a tool to do great things for our members and the community," he said. "We are excited about the possibilities."

'Meant to be'

One of the church's founding members, the Rev. Sadie Woolford, recalled that she and her husband, Llewellyn, were one of six couples who met to form the church in the 1970s.

"We were trying to get 25 families to join and that was a struggle," Woolford said. "We never really imagined it would get this big. We are totally delighted."

Also, there is a touch of sadness.

"So many of our friends didn't live to see it happen. We have been with it every step of the way," said Woolford, 73. Her husband is 79.

Woolford is especially excited about the amount of space the new location affords, such as more classrooms for Sunday school and a hospitality room where worshipers can mingle after services and visit with one another.

"We take pride in welcoming all our visitors in our beautiful new hospitality room," she said.

Woolford, the church's director for pastoral care, conducts bereavement workshops and will have more space for those gatherings as well, she said.

"It is just a blessing how all this happened. We weren't reaching out for that space -- the school system actually called us about it," Woolford said. "We see it as something that was meant to be."

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