Hermon Offers Pine Church Monthly Lease
ORONO — A congregation has been offered a new home by a local high school but with a stipulation.
The Hermon school committee has offered pines church to use Hermon high school’s auditorium for its weekly church services.
However, Matthew Gioia, the lead pastor of the church, says that he’s hesitant to accept because the proposed lease would be on a month-to-month basis causing some uncertainty.
“We have a lot of people that we would need to mobilize to begin to attend church there and even just planning for our Easter service, if we were to send emails out or if we were to print out flyers I have no guarantee that we would be there in April because it is indeed a month to month lease,” says Gioia.
Currently, the church holds its weekly service out of a theater in the spotlight cinema.
Gioia says that his service receives anywhere from 150 to 200 attendees each week which is near the maximum capacity of the theater.
Gioia says, “We want to find a location or avenue that we can grow into it and we feel like we’re bumping up against the cap of 200 people and so we want a place and a space where it gives us room to be able to grow and we know that, okay were going to be here for the next few years.”
When the offer was given and the request for a yearly lease was not approved, Gioia says that his church asked for a compromise from the Hermon school committee.
“We actually met with them and asked them to consider putting a six-month lease back on the docket,” says Gioia.
According to Gioia, the six-month lease was also denied.
At this time pine church has not made a decision as to whether or not they will accept the existing offer.
We reached out to Hermon’s superintendent of schools about the situation but at this time we have not revived any comment.
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