Inside the empty store, volunteers tore up more than 80,000 floor tiles and replaced them with carpeting. They stripped the interior down to the bare walls, hung drywall and installed a dropped ceiling throughout the church. Hillcrest estimates it saved $1 million because clergy and congregants did most of the work.

The T-shirts, cosmetics and cleaning products have been gone for almost a decade from the former Walmart on the outskirts of Seward.

The store’s cavernous shell remained empty for years – an unsightly reminder that discarded large chain stores can be a pain for communities to fill.

For the Hillcrest Evangelical Free Church congregation, which purchased the building in 2008, taking a ghost of the world’s largest retailer and transforming it into a place of worship was quite literally a pain.

“There were many, many blisters on hands,” said the Rev. Lowell Myers, 66, Hillcrest’s associate pastor. “I personally had a lot of aches and pains in my shoulders and neck.”
If it’s true the devil finds work for idle hands, then the corps of volunteers that toiled for 3 1/2 years to turn the building from vacant to vibrant hasn’t been on Satan’s radar.

The first service in the new space was held last month.
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The stores “are not generally pedestrian-friendly, and they often have a stigma attached to them,” Christensen said, explaining the difficulties communities face in finding suitors for abandoned buildings.

If retailers aren’t interested in moving in, towns are left with thousands of vacant square feet, several acres of abandoned property and a dent in potential tax receipts.
“Any time you can fill a vacant lot or storefront, that’s going to be positive for the community,” said Jonathan Jank, Seward County Economic Development’s executive director.

Unlike retailers, churches don’t pay property taxes or generate sales tax. But Jank said the good that Hillcrest will do for Seward “outweighs the negative that would be lost tax revenue.” Eventually the church’s gymnasium and fellowship hall will be open to the public.
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Seward’s former Walmart, which sits less than a mile from the new one, has also gotten an exterior face-lift by way of tan paint and a new towering glass entryway adorned by a large cross.

It spent about $1.6 million to buy and revamp the building’s 43,000 square feet.
The church has a large sanctuary, foyer, gymnasium, fellowship hall, nursery, classrooms, library and kitchen.

As for the abundant space, “We are absolutely using every square foot of it,” Associate Pastor Myers said. “It’s turned out to be a very large and homey building.”

Sunday attendance averages 400 to 450 between two services, Myers said – about 75 more people than in the old building.

In the end, the former Walmart’s new face may be that of a church, but it will take time to forget its commercial past.

“The local store manager brought over nearly a dozen people who work at the new Walmart and previously worked here, and I heard ‘Oh, this is where the pharmacy was’ and those types of things,” Myers said.

“But the other part of their conversation was ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”

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