By Bonnie Mentel
St. Stephen Catholic Church has expanded by building a new Family Life Center on its Boyette campus, where the grade school is located. There are future plans to move the entire parish to the same location.
“We’re excited about this new stage for us to move to the Boyette campus. We don’t expect that our church will be fully operational there until this time next year. For now, the Family Life Center can serve the school and our needs. We’re looking forward, as we grow into it, to hosting events and concerts; many different things for our community,” said Gretchen Robens, communications coordinator at St. Stephen Catholic Church.
St. Stephen’s Church recently celebrated the grand opening of the new Family Life Center with a ribbon-cutting ceremony last month. The Riverview Chamber of Commerce helped to launch the event.
“The size of the new Family Life Center matches our current worship center on Bell Shoals Road. We are getting excited about events there in the future, in addition to expanding the activities of the St. Stephen school,” Robens said.
The school is looking forward to having a new cafeteria for the students. In the past, they’ve had a staggered lunch period to accommodate all the students.
The new building has cafeteria space, a basketball and volleyball court, a large youth room, and eight other classrooms that will be used by the parish and school. The basketball and volleyball courts will allow them to have home games at St. Stephen for the first time. There is also plenty of space for the church’s middle school program, EDGE, which brings in about 300 kids on Monday and Tuesday nights.
“The school has been on the Boyette campus for about 15 years. We knew that we would eventually build a church there, but it’s a big process to build a $16 million dollar church. We upped the first stage of building, which is the Family Life Center, because we knew we needed that immediately,” Robens said.
Until the church can be united on one campus, it looks forward to having its current needs met through the Family Life Center at 10424 Saint Stephen Circle in Riverview. More information about St. Stephen Catholic Church and School can be found at www.ststephencatholic.org.
