Lexington megachurch launches a fourth location in an area poised for growth

Immanuel Baptist Church, one of Lexington’s largest congregations, is adding a fourth location.

The church will officially launch its campus at 4451 Winchester Road on Aug. 11, though services have been ongoing at the site, which was previously Cornerstone Baptist Church.

“Lexington is seeing tremendous growth in the 40509 ZIP code. We have a large television audience in Clark and Bourbon counties. This new campus is strategically located to give the residents of several counties a great option to find their place at Immanuel,” Ron Edmondson, Immanuel’s lead pastor, said in a news release. “Our prayer is to ultimately lead more people closer to Jesus.”

Immanuel announced in a Facebook post in June 2023 that Cornerstone had “voted unanimously to become part of the Immanuel Church family.”

Edmondson said in a video shared on Facebook last summer that the two churches had been in conversation “for a number of months” before the merger became official.

“It was a struggling church,” Bradley Stevenson, Immanuel’s communications director, said in an interview. “Many churches these days are struggling for attendance, and that affects the financial” situation.

He said attendance at Cornerstone had dwindled to about 25 people before the merger, and most of those people have chosen to stay.

Last week, Stevenson said, about 130 people attended services at the new Winchester Road campus. Services are at 11 a.m.

Stevenson said Immanuel’s total attendance on Sundays numbers about 2,000 people, including about 1,500 at the main campus on Tates Creek Road. He said the nearby Armstrong Mill Road campus and Georgetown location attract about 175 each.

That puts Immanuel among the area’s largest churches, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, which also includes Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville and Crossroads Christian Church in Lexington on its database of megachurches.

Each of Immanuel’s campuses has its own teaching pastor providing a live sermon on site each week. Mackey Gaskin is the teaching pastor at the Winchester Road campus.

The campus has a new kids area, and “community groups will be created to provide opportunities for people to gather and grow in their faith,” a news release stated.

With increasing development in the Hamburg area in Fayette County, including a new hospital and school, Stevenson said the 20-acre Winchester Road campus is primed for growth.

“We just knew there was going to be a lot of new housing,” he said.

“Five counties demographically feed into this location,” Edmondson said in the video last summer. “We believe we’re going to reach a lot of people who don’t have a church home.”

Stevenson said this isn’t the first time Immanuel has brought a declining church into its fold, and it may not be the last.

He said the Armstrong Mill Road campus was a struggling congregation when it became part of Immanuel in 2017.

“Our goal is to not let any church die, but to facilitate growth and revitalization,” Stevenson said.

The Georgetown campus was a new church plant.

Immanuel rents space at Scott County High School for those services, and Stevenson said the group will meet in the auditorium of the new high school beginning in September.

Edmondson said in a statement that each of the locations is “unique, but similar,” in that all have “live preaching, engaging worship and welcoming fellowship.”

In addition, 5,000 to 10,000 people view Immanuel’s services online each week, and about 25,000 watch the services on WLEX, which has been broadcasting Immanuel’s services for 67 years, Stevenson said.

“About eight years ago, the Lord really began to challenge our staff leadership with the phrase ‘to whom much is given much is required’ based on Luke 12:48,” Edmondson said. “We have a long history as a church and have been blessed with influence and impact through our online and television ministry throughout Central Kentucky. We became increasingly burdened for the community around us and began looking for ways to reach more people with the Gospel. This family model of additional campuses grew out of those prayers and intentionality. ...This model probably isn’t for every church, but it seems to be working for us.”