In 2019, the Long Range Visioning Team formed at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church to begin a process of discernment around (a) what it means to be church, and (b) how we can use our resources to carry out the mission of our church in an authentic and meaningful way. In particular, we have focused on re-visioning how our land and our buildings contribute to our mission of theological curiosity, moral courage, abundant compassion and beloved community.
We are excited to be already living into an expanded vision of our campus that imagines a mixed-use campus that integrates housing, education, healing and community to provide a hub of repair, connection, and resiliency for the people of Asheville and Western North Carolina.
The experience of COVID-19 broadened our congregation’s awareness to recognize our church community spans across the country and is not limited to physical location. We began conversations around how our physical spaces could be transformed simply from a place for our congregation to worship to a space for the community, including our congregation, to work to heal the wounds of systemic racism, generational trauma, and economic injustice.
The experience of Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024 has continued this transformational process of our physical church grounds as well as the spirit of the church. We converted our sanctuary to an emergency relief center and raised over $5 million in rent support funding to provide thousands of families impacted by the hurricane the ability to stay in their homes.
Togiyasdi is the name the Cherokee gave to the confluence of the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers in what is now Asheville. Our sanctuary sits on just under five acres of land located on Merrimon Avenue in north Asheville. This land was an ancient trade and travel route for the Cherokee. Over the last three centuries, this land was taken from our indigenous brothers and sisters, used by slave-owning landholders for wealth and power accumulation, and redlined to exclude people of color from the state-sponsored benefits of homeownership.
As the inheritors of this legacy, we invite our congregation to reimagine how this land and our faithful work can become a means of repair and healing for our community and the world.