Stu Fuhlendorf’s ideal church building comes with six movie theaters inside and a marquee out front.
Littleton’s Redemption Hills Church, led by Fuhlendorf, paid $2.8 million Tuesday for its new location at 6004 S. Kipling Parkway. The 34,500-square-foot building, formerly home to Elvis Cinemas, is five times larger than the congregation’s current building five minutes down the road.
“People who wouldn’t step into a high church or a separate church environment will come into a building like this and they’ll be much more comfortable,” he said.
The theater closed in March 2023. Redemption Hills bought the building from local real estate investor DoubleBay Partners.
Simultaneously, Redemption Hills sold its property at 7462 S. Everett St., a more traditional church building on 3.2 acres, for $1.7 million to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Both transactions closed just hours apart, according to Tom Mathews, broker with Pinnacle Real Estate Advisors.
“In my career, this is only the second time I’ve done it. And the first time, the closings were staggered by a day or two,” he said.
Mathews helped Redemption Hills sell its old building and find the new one. He spent the better part of six years trying to do so. Two other prospective deals fell through.
“Itap a little bit like making a fine wine, and we were able to make it all come together,” he said.
Redemption Hills was founded 13 years ago with just 30 people. Today it has 10 times that number.
“Our goal here is to create the resources to grow and then church plant. So, as opposed to becoming a mega church, what we want to do … (is) create an underlying theological foundation that we can send people out and church plant,” Fuhlendorf said.
The multimillion-dollar plans for the former movie theater are ambitious. The entire space will be renovated, carving out space for a coffee shop and thrift store. The church is creating a separate nonprofit to manage those, which will also provide community services like soup kitchens and job training.
Fuhlendorf said the church has been leasing the theater at no cost since November and already spent $100,000 to remediate damage caused by trespassers to the property while it was vacant.
That was a pretty big gamble, considering the congregation hadn’t secured financing for the purchase and needed to rezone the former movie theater, which was not a certainty. Fuhlendorf had to make his case to the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners because the property falls within an unincorporated part of the county.
Fortunately, the church received unanimous approval last month.
“The financing, I had a general sense of how we could finance it. But it still was risky, and we just made the decision. We were burning the ships, baby,” Fuhlendorf said.
The 63-year-old previously served as chief financial officer for various tech firms. At age 30, he took his first company public, EFTC Corp. out of Greeley. Fuhlendorf did that again, twice.
It was on the third one in 2006 that he became a Christian.
He said he was on the road in London to promote the IPO for his company, Isilon Systems, when his entourage passed by where Karl Marx formulated “The Communist Manifesto” in the city’s Soho neighborhood.
“Marx might have been wrong about certain things, but he was right about religion. Religion is the opiate of the masses,” he recalls one of his partners saying at the time.
Back then, the younger Fuhlendorf was a self-described alcoholic, gambler and womanizer, an “arguing atheist” whose bible was the Ayn Rand novel “Atlas Shrugged.” But the comment prompted some reflection later that night, which put him into a “pool of snot and tears,” changing his life.
“I went back to the hotel room, and I’m sitting in this lambskin chair at the Savoy Hotel, and I started thinking about the conversation that we had in Soho. And all of a sudden, it hit me.
“Yeah, the world’s fallen. Yeah, the world’s broken. The world’s a damn mess. But if it wasn’t for Jesus, what would the world be like?” Fuhlendorf remembers thinking.
But while the seeds of his faith were planted in that moment, his behavior got worse. He was fired from the company the following year and “lost everything” afterward, he said. The next few years were spent recovering and getting back on his feet. And by 2016, he had earned his Master of Divinity from Denver Seminary and was working at Redemption Hills, where he today serves as senior pastor.
“You wait and see what happens in this church here,” he said. “Honestly, you wait and see the kind of impact this church is going to have. Itap going to be crazy.”
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