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Church that started here ready to occupy new building

by John Gessner
Thisweek Newspapers

Early spring will be a homecoming of sorts for Eden Baptist Church, whose new building in Burnsville has been under construction all fall and winter.

The church opened in Burnsville in 1985 and moved to Savage in 1996. In separate land purchases, it assembled six acres south of Highway 13 in Burnsville once occupied by a city soccer field and the defunct Minnesota Valley Humane Society.

Now the congregation is preparing to move in, probably in April but possibly in March, said the Rev. Dan Miller, Eden Baptist’s longtime senior pastor.

“It’s sort of a bittersweet thing to leave (Savage),” said Miller, a police chaplain in that city. “On the other hand, our roots are in Burnsville, so we’re very pleased to be moving back to that great community. That’s where I’ve lived since 1990, and my four kids are in the public school system in Burnsville, so we’re very rooted in this community, too.”

The new building, located east of Parkwood Drive, will have 17,000 square feet – double the size of the church’s current home.

The sanctuary will seat 410 people. Miller said Eden Baptist’s average Sunday attendance is about 225.

“We have grown incrementally every year since I’ve been here,” said Miller, who came to Eden Baptist in 1989.

“We’re a slow-growth church, very family-oriented and very involved with one another’s lives,” he said. “We kind of just plod along as a church.”

The new church is costing $2.4 million, which includes land and construction, Miller said.

The congregation has outgrown the Savage building, which Miller said has a “ridiculously small” entryway and offices tucked away on the second floor.

“I think from the beginning we did not see it as a permanent location,” Miller said. “We did have a plan that we put into place that this next location would be our final location. And that from there, our next goal would be to spin off another church.”

Originally called Burnsville Baptist Church, Eden Baptist started with small Bible studies held at Nicollet Junior High in Burnsville, Miller said.

When he arrived in ’89, the church had moved its services to the Diamondhead Mall in Burnsville, the former shopping center that became School District 191’s Diamondhead Education Center.

In 1996 the church moved to its current home on Glenhurst Avenue in Savage. The building was originally a small neighborhood grocery store to which the owner had added a much larger warehouse in hopes of finding a tenant.

“And it looked like it was an ideal building for a church building, as far as we were concerned,” Miller said. Eden Baptist has sold the building to another church, Celebracion de Amigos, which is leasing the space back while the new church is built.

Eden Baptist bought the city-owned soccer field when Burnsville officials put the property up for bid in 2002.

It bought the adjacent two acres in 2009 from the Minnesota Valley Humane Society, which operated an animal shelter in a building that had once been Burnsville City Hall.

The Humane Society, which had been looking for a larger building, ultimately folded because of financial problems. But at the time, the nonprofit was pleased that a potential buyer was interested in the property.

“We just thought it doesn’t hurt to ask them,” Miller said. “We were a bit surprised they responded quite quickly and with great interest immediately.”

The church is being built where the animal shelter used to be. West of the building is land for a future gymnasium addition. A narrow strip of land on the east side of the property remains as a play area for children of the congregation.

“We’ve sought to be fairly frugal,” Miller said. “And yet I think it’s going to be a nice facility and an effective facility for us.”

John Gessner is at john.gessner@ecm-inc.com.