LEWISTON — Grace Community Church was a church before it had a steeple, pews or a pulpit.

Before it found its current home — leasing a suite of rooms above Pedro O’Hara’s Restaurant in Lewiston — it rented space in a nearby hotel. Members even met in a bar.

That all ends in July.

The four-year-old congregation has purchased the former East Auburn Baptist Church at the corner of Center and Turner streets in Auburn.

“We will be settled,” Carol McBreairty, a Grace deaconess from Turner, said. “We will have come home. God provided a place for us to be a while. That’s an answer to a prayer.”

It’s been a journey.

Grace Community began as an offshoot of another local parish, New Hope Baptist Church in Lewiston. When a disagreement splintered the congregation, people, including McBreairty, left.

They started by renting space at the Hilton Garden Inn. Some Sundays, they met in the bar area at the Fireside Inn in Auburn. Each service required hours of work to set up before and after the service.

“It was exhausting,” McBreairty said. There were chairs and lights, a sound system and musical equipment to move and set up.

They managed for a year, even looking at the already vacant East Auburn property before leasing space on the second floor above Pedro O’Hara’s in Lewiston.

That, too, needed work.

“It was very rough,” McBreairty said. “It took a lot of imagination to picture it as a place of worship.”

Parishioners tore down walls, painted and furnished the rooms and installed modern seating. They installed permanent lights and sound in the sanctuary and built a stage.

It was still a temporary fix, though.

“We were pretty close to capacity when we moved in at about 100 people,” McBreairty said.

Then, about seven months ago, they saw a spike in attendance. They tried holding more multiple Sunday services. They didn’t feel right. And they were looking at the end of their lease in July.

They toured the vacant St. Joseph’s Church on Main Street, but it felt too big and too grand, church member Chris Abbruzzese said.

“It wasn’t us,” he said.

He had a hard time imagining Grace’s pastor, the Rev. Dave Bochtler, speaking from a high pulpit.

“We’re an intimate congregation,” Abbruzzese said. Bochtler knows almost everyone’s name, knows the families and how everyone’s doing. “He doesn’t like setting himself above anybody.”

They returned to East Auburn. That church had sat empty since late 2007, when the overflowing East Auburn Baptist congregation moved to its new church on Park Street. Since then, the real estate market had fallen. So did the price.

Grace Community agreed to buy the church for $350,000. The property includes a small house, a workshop, a gymnasium and a church sanctuary that can seat about 400 people.

“It was nice to sell to another church,” Randy Corey, East Auburn’s director of special events, said. “So many people have been baptized or married there. “Prospective buyers had come forward with lots of ideas that would have changed the character of the property.

“They’ll use it the way we did, and they’ll grow,” Corey said.

The Auburn complex will offer Grace Community’s members elbow room on Sunday mornings. There will also be classrooms, a kitchen and private spaces for offices and counseling.

The congregation held a six-week “homecoming campaign” to raise money for the property, Abbruzzese said.

“We’re going to have a mortgage, but we don’t know the scope of it, yet,” he said.

So far, they’re uncertain how they’ll fill every space.

“It’s a place that you can do what God’s called us to do,” McBreairty said. “I think we’re going to make the best of that property.”

Abbruzzese was also careful not to overstate the change that comes with wooden pews and a steeple.

“The building is just incidental,” he said. “I think we’re a family that no matter where we are, we’re going to worship.”

“It is God’s house,” he said.

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