McCain details path to new facility, open to public
Messiah Lutheran Church is bringing playtime to church members and the wider community on the east side of Highway 14.
Maintenance chair Troy McCain explained the journey to setting up a playground by the church to keep youth interested in the project.
“We want to make sure that we’re maintaining an avenue for the young kids in the church because if we don’t have younger people in our churches they start to grow old and then the attendance drops off after that,” McCain said. “So we’re trying to look towards the future on that -- to grow the youth in our church -- but then we’ve also come to realize that there is no playground equipment like this on this part of town. People have to cross the highway to get to playground equipment. We felt that this was not only something for our church, but also something for the area here.”
The idea for a playground was first discussed five or six years ago, according to McCain, who has attended the church since 2015. Since then there has been a mix of individual donations and grants that helped the congregation reach its goal of about $65,000, including the Djernes Foundation, the Hamilton Community Foundation and the Immanuel Vision Foundation.
McCain stated that the church had a goal of making the playground accessible to kids of all sizes.
“We wanted to get a playground with an area that’s got some slides and things for small kids,” he explained. “Then we have an obstacle course for the bigger kids.”
The playground includes slides, swings, monkey bars, a pod hopper, an ADA-compliant ramp and a tapered tower with rock climbing all the way up to the bell, the first to be installed by Crouch Recreation.
The path to constructing the playground took a long time to cover. At first the project had to be put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic and then due to labor shortages from the production company, Miracle Recreation Equipment Company. Then the equipment showed up in December of last year, needing to be stored until building could begin in warmer weather.
Volunteers had a member of Crouch Recreation oversee the installation, which began last weekend and is set to end this week.
“We put it in a storage shed that was donated and it stayed there until this last week,” McCain said Friday. “Hopefully today or tomorrow, we’ll get everything installed and then Monday the cement truck will be here to cement in all the posts and then we’ll put down landscaping fabric over the top of everything. Then there’s going to be about a six to eight inch base of rubber mulch that will go over the top of that.”
After the installation there will be an opening event May 21 with members of city council and Mayor Marlin Seeman due to make an appearance.
“It’d be like a ribbon-cutting event,” he said. “I guess that’s what I should say, but we like to have recognition of it.”
McCain also said that he has plans to include more after the initial phase of construction by perhaps the end of the year.
“My wife is a retired librarian who sells books now and I’ve traveled with her to do some sales in public libraries,” he noted. “We went to a library over in Iowa where they have musical instruments in their playground. We’ve been investigating that with as much as music is valued in the high school here. We’ve already got some people willing to donate.”
McCain stated that right now he and many other members of the church are glad that their vision has come true.
“It’ll be a big sigh of relief because it has been such a long process to get to this point,” McCain concluded. “Once we got to a tipping point, everybody saw that we could, that the light was at the end of the tunnel and this was actually going to happen. So this last year there’s been an awful lot of excitement and enthusiasm.”