High Point Church Moves to Eagan

No longer will High Point Church have to call theAMC Showplace movie theater in Inver Grove Heights home, and Lead Pastor Tory Farina couldn't be more happy.

This spring, Farina's church plans to move into a new, 16,000-square-foot facility along Blue Gentian Road in Eagan. The building, a converted warehouse, will have plenty of room for a planned 400-seat auditorium, classrooms and a coffee shop.

Farina, who fondly refers to the space as his church's "starter home," says it will allow his young congregation to have a more permanent, meaningful impact in the surrounding area.

, the church has been based in the movie theater in Inver Grove Heights—with  office park. At the time, the arrangement worked well for the fledgling church, Farina said. But it's hard to hold funerals, weddings or youth programs without a dedicated space, he noted. The church has also grown prodigiously over the past several years, and now counts roughly 275 regular attendees at its weekly services, Farina said.

So Farina and his wife Elizabeth, the church's executive pastor, began looking at available sites in the southeastern suburbs last year—finally settling on the former warehouse, which the church plans to lease, rather than purchase. Farina and his congregation have already raised roughly $250,000 of the more than $400,000 the church will need to completely renovate the building.

The building, they said, will allow them to host more children's events, including kid-friendly services that will run concurrently with the adult worship service on Sunday. Those children's services, Elizabeth said, will focus more on games and interactivity—as well as lessons based around virtues and their corresponding Bible verses.

To say the Farinas are excited for their new facility would be an understatement. The pair presented their floor plans for the building renovations to the congregation on Sunday, Farina said.

"It’s like having your first child," Elizabeth said. "I’m looking forward to being able to have all our operations in one place and have an environment that expresses who we are."

“For us, really, it taking the next step as a church from something that was a start up in a temporary space to something that is a more mature, more exciting and has more to offer,” Farina said.

"We always dreamed, when we started High Point, that the whole idea would be that it is a church to reach this region of the city, the southeast corner of St. Paul," Farina said. “I think we’ve done that, taking [the church] from my wife and I in our living room to 275 people ... We feel we’re on the cusp of a real break out."