LYNN — After about a decade of long hours spent putting the historic church back together piece-by-piece, Iglesia Evangelica Luz y Vida congregation members expect to finish renovating their South Common Street church, the former home of Temple Anshai Sfard, this summer.
The congregation bought the 383-year-old church in 2010, when Boston developer Rolando Pam approached the growing congregation with an invitation to buy the building for $75,000 — roughly one-tenth of the property’s assessed value — according to city records. Since then, the congregation, with the help of some contractors, worked an average of 45 weekends a year, and two out of five weekdays, to completely restore the formerly-abandoned building.
Congregation construction team leader Julio Polonia said that Iglesia Evangelica Luz y Vida expects to spend about $1.5 million restoring the building – less than half an architect’s $4 million estimate.
“It would be four [million dollars] if we hadn’t done the work ourselves,” Polonia said.
In 2001, Polonia, who was on the board of directors at the Iglesia Cristiana Torrente church on Franklin Street, left to branch into a new, more modern congregation, Iglesia Evangelica Luz y Vida. One of the older pastors, Jose Mateo, worked every day to restore the church, only to die a year before the basement opened.
“He worked his tail off. He was here seven days a week. He was retired, and was here every day working,” Polonia said.
Iglesia Evangelica Luz y Vida now uses the basement, which the congregation dug 18 feet deeper to accommodate height requirements, as the church’s main meeting room.
“We bought a Bobcat and we dug it out for about a year, every weekend, just taking dirt and bringing it outside,” Polonia said.
Down the hall, the basement now encloses four fully-renovated classrooms for the congregation’s youth program, and two functioning bathrooms equipped with marble counters and brand new tiles, installed by contractors who, Polonia said, only charged for materials.
In the basement’s spacious function room lives a set of hand drums, a drumset, microphones and a guitar, all wired to a recording system. The congregation, which Polonia said will soon host after-school music recording and mixing lessons, emphasized the role of music in the planning of their youth programs.
“We want to work with the youth, because we have a nice sound system downstairs, so one of our guys here wants to teach kids how to mix their own music. We have an electrical engineer who is a member of the church, and then we have a couple of guys who do really good sound […] The budget for the sound system in there is about $200,000,” he said.
The enormous chapel, with seemingly stratospherically tall ceilings and rich acoustics, wears a fresh coat of white primer paint. The altar, recently designed for Americans with Disabilities Act compliance, overlooks a wide, pewless chapel. Polonia said that the pews had been damaged by heat fluctuations during the chapel’s 20-year abandonment, and it was cheaper to tear them down and replace them than it would have been to refurbish them. The wood from the pews, whose removal would have been a long and potentially costly endeavor, was shipped overseas to be repurposed.
“Most of the sitting area on the benches was messed up, but the arch area for the backs was in one piece […] it would have cost us an arm and a leg to dispose of all that wood, so when he said he’d take it, it was like ‘oh yeah! Sure!’” Polonia said.
At the tail end of a decade’s worth of labor, two years of which were halted by the pandemic, Polonia said that he was excited to see the fruits of his congregation’s labor.
“It will definitely be a big thing when it’s finished,” Polonia said. “It’s just amazing, the rich history in one church.”
