Westwood Community Church began in 1995 as an outreach to the Southwest Minneapolis suburbs by Wooddale Church, originally located in the Loring Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.
During the early years, Westwood held services in rented locations until a permanent church home was constructed in Chanhassen in 2003.
It didn’t take long for Westwood itself to begin its expansion. In 2011, the church helped to start Westbrook Church in Chaska.
In 2009, Anderson Companies was introduced to Westwood, and with architect Cuningham Group, they partnered to complete an expansion of its Chanhassen location.
Almost doubling the physical size of the church, the new space incorporated an adult learning/fellowship space, as well as a youth group area.
The design echoed the north woods style of the original building while creating a new youth entry with active student spaces. The addition allowed for a new courtyard/play area to be situated between the two wings.
In 2016, Westwood launched its first multisite church — Westwood Minnetonka — in a rented facility, yet recently decided to suspend the church until a new location can be secured.
Then, in 2018, Anderson Companies and Cuningham Group helped Westwood design and build out a new multisite church in Bloomington named Westwood Bush Lake.
Located just off Bush Lake Road and 494, the church is leasing space in a commercial industrial flex facility. The team transformed the space into a welcoming church with a 450-seat sanctuary, educational rooms, a café and a generous narthex.
Westwood Community Church has a bold vision for its future, which focuses on expanding its faith community. They call this 10-year vision 10/10/10.
The first part of the 10 is to create 10 multisite churches. A multisite has its own campus pastor, live worship music, great kids and student programs, and the teaching message broadcast on giant screens, yet all the multisites share the same church leadership and structure.
The second 10 is to help start independent churches for immigrants and culturally diverse communities within the Twin Cities.
The last 10 is church planting, which is training pastors to go start churches in locations throughout the world that are considered to be under-churched.
Anderson Companies provides clients with complete construction and development services backed by the Anderson Advantage: a team of industry professionals that complements its large-company experience and market knowledge with hard work, agility, responsiveness and just great customer service, www.andersoncompanies.us.
