Barn turned into church reincarnated as a home

A title search at the county courthouse won’t show it, but there’s clear evidence that Lee and Diane Smith’s Spokane Valley home of 30 years once was occupied by Jesus or at least several of the Good Lord’s friends.

A dark-shingled steeple towers four stories over the couple’s front door, and arched stained-glass windows grace the home’s clapboard-sided flanks.

“My husband has joked several times that we should put out donation baskets,” Diane Smith said.

The collection plate might not fill up quickly, however – the building is hard to find. The Smiths’ home is on east Valleyway Avenue one block east of north Sullivan Road. It gets all the smells of the Starbucks coffeehouse less than 100 yards away, all the squeals of children playing at nearby Pioneer School and the seemingly endless drone of tires on Sullivan’s asphalt.

Once, you could see this small chapel from four blocks away on Sprague Avenue, but a strip mall and an electrical substation shield the building from view now. When it was more visible, the building belonged to Good Shepherd Lutheran Church.

“I remember how cold it got in there,” said Joyce Neste, a Good Shepherd charter member. “It started out as a barn and a chicken coop. We were meeting at Veradale Grade School when we bought it.”

Neste’s congregation hired a contractor to convert the barn and coop into a combination church/Bible school. Apparently the group picked the right builder for the job because he produced a half dozen beautiful stained-glass windows, rescued from a defunct church in Minnesota.

The congregation planned to use a modest stone house at the front of the 2.5 acres as a parsonage.

It wasn’t a bad setup, Neste said. Her children were baptized there; other people were married there or received last rites inside the humble building.

But within five years, Good Shep-herd was looking for a bigger barn for its flock. The congregation broke ground for a building at Eighth Avenue and South Sullivan.

The old church on Valleyway slipped into disrepair. Weeds grew up around it. Then some hippies moved in – at least that’s what Neste remembers hearing. After the hippies moved out, some bikers took up residence in the old chapel. Smith remembers hearing stories of motorcycles being driven through the chapel’s front door.

The post-Lutheran tenants left their mark. When the Smiths moved into the church, they found hatchet marks where someone swinging at firewood had missed and hit the floor.

Those battle scars weren’t fresh. The building had been vacant for some time when the Smiths arrived in the 1970s to fill the chapel with their own congregation of six children. Many of the windows were broken.

Inside, the Smiths found few remaining traces of Good Shepherd, save for a small chapel warmed by the light of stained glass and vaulted ceilings tall enough to accommodate a giant.