Maryville Vineyard Opens Second Location at Former Alcoa High School

Maryville Vineyard, a church that meets on William Blount Drive in Maryville, has opened a second location in Alcoa. The church started in 2004, and lead pastor Aaron McCarter oversees it. Before the expansion, the church held five services on Sunday morning across its one venue.

The new site, Springbrook Vineyard, meets each Sunday morning at Alcoa Middle School, which was formerly Alcoa High School. Worship and Communications Pastor Matt Farrand said the first service there was held in October. The church chose to open a second location rather than expand its existing building.

Lindsay Mizell, the venue pastor for Springbrook, has been part of Maryville Vineyard since the beginning. She is now helping to lead the Alcoa campus.

The church’s growth led to crowding. Farrand said that as attendance rose to about 900, the church ran out of room, and it made several temporary changes. One service was moved to Saturday, and a 5 p.m. Sunday service was added because no Sunday morning times remained open.

Those changes were not lasting solutions, so a team was formed to look for a second venue where more Sunday morning services could be added without the cost of building something larger. “We tried everything,” Farrand said. “We tried services at really bad times because we were out of traditional times to do church on Sunday morning.”

The solution came from Alcoa Middle School. Another congregation, Blount Community Church, had held services in the building for 10 years before it built its own home off Lamar Alexander Parkway. Maryville Vineyard’s team pursued the space as a way to keep working steadily on the church’s growing ministry with limited resources (Colossians 3:23).

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