Jonesboro church launches capital campaign for move

Blessed Sacrament will move to new location to accomodate future growth

Published: September 17, 2016

By Sarah Morris
Jonesboro Correspondent

Blessed Sacrament Church is raising $5.5 million to build a new church, administrative offices and parish hall expansion on Highland Drive in Jonesboro.

Blessed Sacrament Church is raising $5.5 million to build a new church, administrative offices and parish hall expansion on Highland Drive in Jonesboro.

JONESBORO — Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church is preparing to build its new home.

Church members are currently in the middle of a capital campaign hoped to raise $5.5 million by the end of September. Jeff Puryear, capital campaign chairman, said the parish will relocate its church and administrative offices and complete the parish hall that was constructed a few years ago.

The project’s total cost is $9 million, which includes a portion of the parish hall and school that are already constructed and in use. Puryear said he is excited about the response.

“We’ve been meeting starting last fall to prepare for the campaign that we kicked off a few weeks ago,” Puryear said. “The committee is comprised of parish volunteers who are reaching out to the parishioners. We are reaching out to the parishioners and talking to them. That’s what it amounts to. Our Hispanic brothers and sisters are going to have some events as well as part of the campaign.”

In April, the parish announced it would be moving from its current two-and-a-half-acre property in downtown Jonesboro to 20 acres on East Highland Drive. The move has been in the works for 15 years.

Eighty-five percent of parishioners felt favorable or very favorable of the plan when the new church and campus plan was presented.

In his Sept. 3-4 homily, pastor Father Alphonse Gollapalli said, “It is clear and loud to us that at this time our cross is to rebuild our church and rebuild the parish.”

“... For more than a decade we have deliberated on our projects and have taken a collective decision. We first sat down and calculated the cost of our projects,” he said. “Our old buildings are going down one after the other. ... There is no putting off decisions we must make about our contributions.

“It’s not about later; it’s about now,” he added. “At this point of need we should not think as individuals. It is urgent that we take up our burdens of one another. Act for the benefit of the church. We shall carry this cross as a church.”

Blessed Sacrament purchased the new property over a two-year span starting in 2000 after it could not expand in its current location. The Knights of Columbus built a hall on the property in 2003, and the elementary school relocated there in 2011.

The current church was sold in November to St. Bernards Healthcare for $3.5 million. The former school and parish hall have already been torn down, but parishioners will stay in the current 360-seat church until December 2017.

Nabholz Construction was hired to build the new church, which will hold about 800 people. An estimated 2,000 families are registered at the church.

“The parish has had growth and the plan years ago was the campus would move,” Puryear said. “That was when we bought the property on Highland so we have come to a point where we begin to implement the plan to put everything on one campus on Highland.”

The parish will have to be out of its current church in 2017, but Puryear said the exact date will depend largely on when the old church has to be torn down.