Immanuel's Beginnings and Our History

How well we remember the beginnings of Immanuel's Church. A dozen folks gathered around the Schmitt's family room worshipping and praying and pouring over the Word of God. That was in 1982.

We soon grew and moved to the New Hampshire Avenue Spanish Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) fellowship hall in 1983. We remained there less than a year as we increased to over 100 saints. Some of the first folks at the SDA were Bruce and Fran Ladson and their family. We celebrated our first anniversary at E. Brooke Lee School in Wheaton where we grew to just over 400.

In March 1989, we moved into our own Worship Center at 16819 New Hampshire Avenue where Immanuel's continues to grow and flourish today. Originally, we thought we would have enough room to continue our orderly growth, but we were virtually full from the first day we opened our doors! In a venture of faith we then finished the balcony and all of the second floor classrooms and began a second service—all in our first year in our new worship center. In the years in the original building we grew from 400 to 1500 saints and it appeared that we had outgrown every bit of space we had!

Then in 1996, after our 3-year building project, we stood at the threshold of a fresh new open door made possible by our new Worship and Ministry Center, built five times larger than our original building. On December 24, we held our first service in our new sanctuary. We went from a 20,000 square foot building into just over 2¾ acres of anointed floor space (over 120,000 square feet). Today we worship with an inter-generational, multi-cultural congregation of approximately 4,000 men, woman, and children.

Our constant cry has been and will continue to be that the Lord fill His House with His Glory! Immanuel's is a multi-ethnic, evangelical, interdenominational church with a strong emphasis on the victorious life. We seek to be a Christ-centered, Spirit-filled, Bible-based Church with a vision to bring every member of Christ's Body into a personal, intimate and ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ through a revelation of who they are in Him and who He is in them; and all of this with the objective of each member fulfilling his/her calling in the Body of Christ as Jesus' hands extended into all the earth!