By Renee Larr
Carmel Lutheran Church recently outgrew its 10-acre site in Carmel. As membership increased, it became evident other locations would be necessary.
“The church will be celebrating our 40th anniversary in January. We started in 1977. It was built out in a cornfield on the east side of Carmel,” Senior Pastor Luther Brunette said. “Since that time, we’ve grown and we’ve completely built out everything possible that we could have on those 10 acres. As our ministry has expanded, we realized the only way we could continue to grow and carry out the (mission) is to have other sites. The growth continued to boom over in Fishers. We realized we had about 1,000 of our disciples that cross the White River to come over to our Carmel site. It became obvious to us that Fishers would be a great place to replicate our ministry that we have here in Carmel.”
With the addition of the Fishers location, CLC realized it could no longer continue its ministry with the name Carmel Lutheran Church. It called on worshippers to come up with a new name.
“It was quite a process to do that to get the name changed. We did a survey of the congregation. We said we would like it to be something that starts with C so that we can still call ourselves CLC,” Brunette said. “The hope was to have another C word that was biblical and reflected our ministry while keeping that moniker. We got 1,300 responses. Cornerstone was the one that rose to the top. Finally, then the whole congregation voted and it passed overwhelmingly.”
The Fishers location will open in November and will have an indoor playground. Ministries will be the same at each location each week.
“The hope is that the playground would draw families into our facility,” Brunette said. “I like to use the phrase, ‘Come to play, stay to pray.’”
For more, visit cornerstonelutheran.church.
