LYNNWOOD — It’s like something seen on a European horizon, except it’s in Lynnwood.
Passing by on 204th Street SW, drivers can’t help but stop and look at the magnificent and rare architecture for this area.
The new Coptic Orthodox Church is the fruition of dreams of the St. Mary’s congregation that is bulging the seams of it’s current home, a converted church on 52nd Avenue W. in Lynnwood.
With priest Father Takla Azmy as leader, congregation members come from all over the Puget Sound area. While there are two other Coptic churches in the state, this is the largest, said longtime congregation member Dr. William Salama.
Copts have Egyptian roots but aren’t Arabs, Salama said. “Present Egyptians are mostly Muslim, they are the Arabs,” Salama said. “About 15 percent of them are Copts and Copts are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians.”
Out of those Copts, about 2 percent are non-orthodox, following Catholic, Protestant or other denominations, Salama said.
Coptic Orthodox Church members follow the teachings of St. Mark the Evangelist. “He wrote the book of St. Mark in the Bible,” Salama said.
Church membership has been growing leaps and bounds, about 170 families, since it started in the early 1980s, he said. For five years now, the congregation has been planning for the construction of this new church, Salama said.
“It’s very exciting,” he said. “We found that this is the time to build a another church. It was our dream to build a church the Coptic Orthodox style, leaving a living tradition to our children.”
The footprint of the church is the shape of the cross and the towers and domes are also symbols.
After the construction is finished in July, the congregation has hired an artist, an “iconographer,” he said, to paint icons or special teachings of the church on the walls and domes in a mural fashion.
Sherman Stone, the project manager for the church, said “it’s going to be the most beautiful, breathtaking church on the West Coast, just like in Europe.”
Brent Kohrs, the project engineer for the church from Allied Construction Association of Everett, said they have built worship facilities in the past but nothing like this.
“This is the most elaborate,” Kohrs said.
Ray Ernst Architects of Seattle designed the church.
Kohrs said the project has been unique because there are always a lot of design questions.
“Like, design as you go,” Kohrs said, “It’s a difficult, complex project with lots of detail.”
Kohrs said the church is made of concrete masonry units and steel. The main floor is 24,000 square feet and there is also a full basement. There are three domes, each about 65 feet high.
It took a 240-ton crane, from Ness Cranes, to lift the large dome in place, he said, “There is a lot of steel in this building, a lot of it.”
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