New Hope Church in Clackamas plans rebuild in mall-like ‘village’

By RICHARD KOE
    CLACKAMAS — New Hope Com-munity Church, the high-profile church off Interstate 205 and Southeast Sunnyside Road, has big visions of a village-style combination of church and commerce in place of its present landmark sanctuary with the lighted cross on top.
    Ray Cotton, senior pastor, told his 3,500-member congregation in special planning meetings the past few months that there’s a need for a community gathering place. He noted that churches across the country have used new designs to appeal to changing consumer tastes in recent years.
    Developers told The Oregonian that with its proposed Eagle Landing development, New Hope could become the first church to reinvent itself as a civic center fully integrated into a commercial complex. Plans call for the church to anchor the village with an assembly of stores, condos, offices, restaurants, a hotel, and health club.
    Add a sky bridge to the mix along with fountains and plazas, with shared parking tucked underground. The plan caters to people who like to gather with a small group of friends in places like Starbucks.
    Brad Eisenmann of Chicago’s Aspen Group, a church design and architectural firm, said churches the past 20 or 30 years built huge auditoriums and performance-based services which appeal to baby boomers, much like the present New Hope structure with its 2,800-seat sanctuary.
    The national trend now follows a “multi-venue” approach, with churches appealing to tastes of post-modern generations by offering more intimate spaces and a broader range of meeting times and formats.
    Gary Reddick, president of Sienna Architecture Co., a Portland-based firm that is designing the project’s mixed-used phase for developer Neil Nedlisky, said the proposal follows a pattern of 19th-century European villages, where the community is framed around the local church.
    This pattern will be brought back at Eagle Landing in an integrated way, putting together all of those things that typically used to make up a town.
    Cotton said the design team, in visiting projects across the country, never found a development with a fully-integrated church. Atlanta’s Buckhead Church has shops and office towers connected by sky bridges to shared parking, but the church facilities are reserved for church use only.
    New Hope would serve as the development’s civic center, including a coffee shop, bookstore, and community preschool. Its church auditorium and meeting rooms would be available as a community and convention center.
    The Portland area is now seeing more plans for lifestyle developments, inspired by places like the city’s Pearl District, Lake View Village in Lake Oswego, Bridgeport Village near Tualatin and the Streets of Tanasbourne in Hillsboro with their mixed- use developments incorporating store fronts, plazas, public art, walking paths, and gathering spaces.
    Nedelisky wants to take the retail concept a step further at Eagle Landing to create a fully functioning 24-hour community that incorporates work, recreation, community involvement, and spiritual life in addition to shopping and dining. Each use would complement the others.
    The developer hopes to build 2.1 million square-feet of mixed development on the 33-acre site, including nearly 1,000 apartments and condos, a dozen restaurants, about 600,000 square feet of office space. a 100,000 square-foot church, and a 400-seat chapel.
    Other components of the village would include two amphitheaters, an outdoor movie screen, rock-climbing wall, a rooftop skate park, and automated parking.
    The vision is still a work in progress. No formal development applications or even pre-applications have been filed with Clackamas County. Traffic is expected to a major hurdle for approval, and the county wants to make sure the village meets the needs of the community.
    Nedelisky acknowledges a long public process ahead, but he and Reddick hope the finished development will be a national example of community-building in a time when gasoline and property prices are rising.
Both hope that the proposed community offer a successful Starbucks-like experience from one end to the other. Watch for further developments.