To Joann Deslauries, God’s faithfulness looks like the closets in her Sunday school classrooms. 

That’s because for 14 years Trinity Presbyterian Church in Owasso, Oklahoma, where Deslauries is vision director for children’s ministry, did not have designated Sunday School classrooms. That changed in February 2025 when it moved into its newly-constructed building.

Over the years Trinity has moved often, holding services in more than 12 locations since 2011. The congregation has worshiped in church buildings, school cafeterias, and YMCA facilities.

Children’s ministry sometimes took place in hallways, with portable dividers for classroom walls. A wheeled wooden crate, stored in a church trailer, held supplies and furniture. At times volunteers had to set up classrooms around the school’s cleaning schedule. Once, water leaked into the trailer, and everything got moldy.

But Sunday school always happened.

“We didn’t miss a Sunday,” Deslauries, a former schoolteacher, said. “It was just God taking care of us.”

Today, God’s care looks like four classrooms with large windows, closets, and child-sized stools and tables. Bats, lizards, and other native Oklahoma animals are carved into wooden wainscotting along the bottom of the walls where children can see and feel them.

“The beauty of God needs to be reflected in our environments, and especially in our churches,” Deslauries explained. “That doesn’t mean expensive. It just means thoughtful.”

It comes as no surprise that Deslauriers explains the classrooms’ design with theology. Trinity’s entire building project has one goal: to communicate the gospel through architecture.

Searching for Permanence

Leaders at Trinity have been praying for a building since 2011 when the church was still a church plant. Trinity particularized in 2013, still without a permanent space for Sunday worship. In 2014 the church established a committee to look for a permanent building. 

Trinity has planted two daughter churches: Three Rivers Presbyterian Church in Grove, Oklahoma, in 2015, and Hope Presbyterian Church in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 2018. Both congregations found buildings, but Trinity still moved regularly. 

Church leaders scoured neighborhoods for buildings to purchase. In an area full of new builds, leaders could not find anything to suit Trinity’s needs. 

In 2018 the church bought 15 acres of land and launched its first capital campaign. By 2020, the church had raised just over $1 million to pay off the property. It then launched its second capital campaign, called Rise, to raise $3.6 million for the first of a three-phase building project. They exceeded that goal.

“We believe Trinity’s vision will be better executed through a permanent facility,” lead pastor Blake Altman wrote in an August 2017 letter on behalf of the session, outlining the vision for building. “We can be strategic with the gospel and hospitable in new ways, breaking through Tulsa’s predominant cultural idols of performance, power, materialism, and comfort with the good news of the gospel.”

Construction on the first phase, Trinity Hall, began in 2022 and finished at the end of 2024. The congregation began worshipping in the building in 2025. As they waited for construction to begin, Trinity often held services under a tent on the property where Altman encouraged congregants that one day, there would be a building. 

Now, there is. The 13,609 square-foot building contains four classrooms, a kitchen, and a multi-purpose room for worship services. The third and final phase of the building will hold a permanent sanctuary.

For Altman, the goal of capital campaigns is not raising money or even constructing a building. It’s about helping people become better disciples of Jesus and serving the community. 

“Any fundraising campaign is not about money,” he said. “It’s about the vision of what the community can be.” 

Trinity’s vision is for God’s grace to change every part of people’s lives, and for people to rest in worship, grow in community, and discover their callings. These values are all built – literally – into Trinity Hall.

“A church building is not ‘neutral’ space; it will communicate something,” Altman wrote in his 2017 letter. 

The building is made of stone, partly for simpler maintenance, but mainly to show permanence and stability. The Gothic style of the fellowship hall makes it different from a classroom or general multi-purpose room.

“It helps communicate a sense of transcendence,” Altman said, explaining the intent for the room’s design. But importantly, the architecture deliberately communicates the gospel.

Carvings in each of the 12 wooden hammer beams retell parts of Scripture. The pulpit sits between the beam for the crucifixion and the one for the resurrection. 

When people worship, “they see that they are in the ark of God’s protection inside the covenant community,” said Altman. “When we worship, you literally worship under the authority of God’s Word.”

Congregants leave the church reminded of who Jesus is. The back wall has seven sections of wooden wainscotting, each carved with one of Jesus’ I AM statements from the Gospel of John. This helps reinforce the calling of the church. 

“The church is God’s hands and feet in the world by the Spirit,” said Altman. “The church is not just another organization.” 

Rest for the Weary

Trinity Hall also embodies the church’s value of “rest in worship.” It features a fireplace carved with Jesus’ words from Matthew 11:28 inviting the weary and heavy laden to come to him. There’s a book nook to give parents suggestions of quality books for their children.

After years of Sunday mornings spent unloading trailers and setting up chairs, coming to Sunday worship has been restful for many of Trinity’s volunteers, says Altman. 

“It felt for many people like they were able to physically rest in a new way in that building,” Altman said. The building allows members to focus on the church’s mission, “inviting people and focus[ing] on presenting the gospel,” he said. 

The work is far from finished, though. Phase 2, not yet started, will include more classrooms for adult Sunday School, children’s and youth ministry spaces, and offices. (Trinity continues to rent office space elsewhere.) 

The final phase will be the permanent sanctuary. The church hopes to provide space to local ministry-minded organizations but is waiting until at least 2026 before allowing organizations to use the space.

“We want the church to be a blessing to others,” said Altman.

As she helps lead children’s ministry, Joann Deslauries is already seeing how children are blessed by having a place to learn Scripture where they can, in her words, “marinate” in God’s Word. The classrooms allow her to set up displays themed around the lesson. In one, children tried to get rust off tools to show the importance of storing up treasures in heaven that cannot be destroyed by rust. In another, they used sticks and rocks to build nests to remind them of how God cares for birds.

As she watches them, Deslauries sees God’s care for her and the church. 

“I knew God is faithful before we started this,” she said. “But there’s something about going through a building project where God’s faithfulness is so clear. You cannot doubt it.”

That certainty is important. In a church full of young families, Deslauries knows they need more space.

“It meets our needs, but we’re going to outgrow it very quickly.”

And when they do, she’s confident that God will meet that need, too.