Meet NorthPoint Church
NorthPoint Church is a staple of Johnston, Iowa. Founded in 1917, it has evolved with the area over the decades. In the late 90s, the church bought a 13-acre plot of land in corn fields to build a new building, which was constructed by the early 2000s. Initially, there wasn’t much in the area, but in the past 10 years, multiple schools have been built nearby, bringing hundreds of students into the vicinity. The church even serves as a reunification center for those academic organizations in the event of an emergency.
In 2014, Jeremy Carr became the lead pastor of the church, and four years later, the church went through a minor remodel to refresh its kids’ entrance and worship center. That’s when it officially became NorthPoint Church. Its community-focused identity was clear, but its leadership already knew a small refresh wasn’t going to help them realize the scope of their mission-driven heart for the local central-Iowa community.
A Space for the Heart of Iowa
Along with Sunday services, NorthPoint leadership wanted to create a space to invite neighbors and meet local community needs. Their thought was to build a community center. The question was, how?
In the early 2020s, a community center entered the discussion again. Leadership started to look for ways to create opportunities, find partners, and discover what this new space should look like. They even created a new ministry for the effort and talked with architects.
When the NorthPoint leadership priced out a new structure, they found that a Build and Design architect (i.e., an all-in-one designer/architect/general contractor) was going to charge an additional 22% of the entire cost of the project. This ballooned the cost even further, to several million dollars — a serious sum, even for a larger church. It would require a significant capital campaign and was certainly not a decision to take lightly.
Fortunately, before they committed to anything, they realized that working with an architect this early in the process was putting the cart before the horse. Before they planned a new structure, they needed to identify specific needs they would meet, sort out financing, and create a strategy. That’s what led them to Nathan Artt, Dave Dummitt, and Ministry Solutions Group.
The Ministry Solution
At one point, as NorthPoint leadership struggled with their decision, Larry Osborne, pastor at North Coast Church in Vista, California, referred Carr, Sorrell, and company to Ministry Solutions Group for advice and direction.
Before long, MSG had a team on-site for a free analysis that included principal and founder Nathan Artt, pastor and consultant Dave Dummitt, and David Evans from the architectural firm Mantel Teter. Their expertise, built on years spent planning and executing hundreds of millions of dollars in church building activation, quickly proved to be invaluable.
Artt and Dummitt asked insightful, holistic, “where are you at” kinds of questions. They challenged the NorthPoint staff to think big picture, consider staff requirements, and so on. The resulting conversations quickly led to the conclusion that a new building might not be the right move at all. Instead, they recommended using their existing building in more creative ways, something John Sorrell referred to as feeling like “a puzzle falling into place.”
.jpg)
A Fully Activated Building
Ministry Solutions Group’s Clear Path Forward proved instrumental in helping NorthPoint find its ideal answer to meeting community needs. The two-day intensive brought a unique sense of clarity as MSG’s team met with different people involved, including elders and core team members.
They talked about realities, pinch points, struggles, kids' ministry growth, and even parking concerns. They looked at financials, heat maps of Northpoint attendance, and overall readiness for a community-oriented expansion on this scale.
After the Clear Path Forward process, the NorthPoint team was able to spend weeks and months dreaming through ideas. Artt and the MSG team remained involved as the vision came together, functioning as partners rather than in-and-out consultants. They even helped NorthPoint hire generosity consultant Rusty Lewis to pave the way for the coming campaign.
In fall 2023, NorthPoint committed to the building activation plan. By January 2024, the plan was in motion, and they broke ground before the end of the year. Phase One of the project is set to open in summer 2025 and will come in the form of a 9,000-square-foot addition to the NorthPoint campus and a complete remodel of the current kids' ministry space that will house a Pathways Learning Academy children's program.
Phase Two will follow in the fall and consists of reactivating the middle portion of the building. It will replace the hotel-like partitioned space with:
- A cafe
- Sports courts
- An indoor play place
- Two new conference rooms
- A four-office counseling center
In addition to the activated and optimized spaces, the NorthPoint project will create a number of new jobs in the area, including a director position for the childcare center.
Sorrell told MSG that the church plans to dedicate these new spaces by having church members write prayers on the concrete slab for the new space before the new flooring is installed, ensuring the space is fully dedicated to kingdom-building work for the foreseeable future.
Looking forward, NorthPoint is thinking even bigger. They still have several unused acres to maximize, and they want to make the space useful and flexible for felt needs in the area in the next few years. It is a forward-thinking vision with clarity and precision, and the Ministry Solutions Group is proud to have been part of this ongoing spiritual and community transformation in the heart of central Iowa.
