The Story of National Community Church
In 1996, we inherited the small fledgling group known as National Community Church.
Only three people showed up at our first Sunday service on January 7, 1996—my wife, Lora, our son Parker and me. This Sunday was also the day of a record-breaking blizzard that blanketed Washington, DC! Most church planters don’t experience 600-percent growth the week after they launch, but we did. Nineteen people came the next week for our service at the Giddings School located near the Capitol Building in Southeast DC.
Nine months later, the school was closed due to fire code violations—effective immediately. With an average attendance of 25, we didn’t feel like a church yet, and we were about to become a homeless church.
After a prayer walk around Capitol Hill, God opened an amazing door of opportunity to hold services at the movie theaters at Union Station.
By mid-November, 1996, we had found our new home—complete with sticky floors, spilled popcorn, and even a few misplaced moviegoers. Few churches could claim their building welcomed 25 million visitors each year, had its own bus and metro stops, train station, shopping mall, food court and parking garage. We attracted a wide variety of people as we were located four blocks from the Capitol and four blocks from the largest homeless shelter in the city.
Several years later, we experienced our biggest jump in attendance when The Washington Post ran a front page article on NCC. People from all over the city began finding us at Union Station. We added additional services, but still had vision to reach more people in the DC metropolitan area.
On September 21, 2003, we launched our second location in the Ballston Common Mall movie theaters just over the river in Northern Virginia. That began our journey as a multi-site church, meeting in movie theaters across DC and Northern Virginia.
Doing church in the middle of the marketplace had become part of our DNA and we began dreaming of new ways for the church and community to intersect daily.
One of the crazier dreams we began circling in prayer was to purchase an abandoned building one block from Union Station that was once a crack house and build a coffeehouse.
In the spring of 2006, construction was completed on Ebenezers Coffeehouse®. The driving motivation behind building a coffeehouse was the fact that Jesus hung out at wells. They were natural gathering places in ancient culture. Ebenezers is a postmodern well that has served more than a million customers—neighbors, business people, and members of congress alike.
By October 2009, we had launched services at movie theaters in Georgetown in DC and Kingstowne in Virginia and were continuing to grow.
Then, we got a phone call that the Union Station movies theaters would be closing immediately. Our three Sunday services at Union Station had nowhere to go, so we crammed into the performance level of Ebenezers for what we hoped would be a temporary solution. Over the next few years we launched our fifth and sixth locations at the movie theaters at Potomac Yard in Northern Virginia and in Northwest DC at the GALA Theatre.
Our “theaterchurch” years included campuses at the movie theaters at Potomac Yard, Kingstowne, Ballston, and Gainesville in Northern Virginia and in DC at the GALA Theatre, Echostage, and the Lincoln Theatre. We also met in Georgetown at Visitation school. These rich years planted us firmly in the middle of the marketplace and enabled us to hold church in rented spaces already equipped with a stage, big screen, and sound equipment. It was an ideal setup for that time in the life of our church.
It was right after the Union Station theaters closed that Pastor Mark met a pastor who had a church on the other side of Capitol Hill.
Founded by his father in 1963, Michael Hall had pastored The People’s Church for decades. After years of meeting in a turn-of-the-century movie theater across the street from the Marine Corps Barracks, the majority of The People’s Church had migrated to the suburbs. Pastor Hall had considered selling at one point, even looking at an offer from a nightclub. But the People’s Church believed that the building would always be used for God’s purposes. Knowing that they had at one point considered selling and moving out to the suburbs, I prayerfully asked Pastor Hall if we could make an offer. That led to a double miracle that answered prayers for both our congregations.
Pastor Hall would later share a vision he had of young people filling the building and praising God. “At the time,” he said, “I thought the vision was for us. Now I know it was for you.” Renamed “The Miracle Theatre,” NCC has restored the building’s rich history as a vaudeville theater and began hosting four weekend worship services there.
In 2016, we celebrated our 20-year anniversary with a “reverent party” at DAR Constitution Hall where over 3000 current and former NCCers gathered to celebrate all that God has done for and through this church family.
On August 23, 2017, a years-long dream came to fruition.
National Community Church, the DC community, and Mayor Muriel Bowser gathered to celebrate the grand opening of the the DC Dream Center. DCDC’s history goes back three decades to the founding of the Southeast White House by Sammie Morrison and Scott Dimock. These two DC residents, one Black, one white, had a passion for racial unity. These two friends worked tirelessly for decades to establish regular reconciliation events, mentoring, and family support programs that DCDC continues today.
In 2010, Morrison and Dimock, both in their seventies, bequeathed their vision, ministry, and a building to National Community Church. NCCers worked together with community members to dream dreams and raise funds for this new community enter. An abandoned apartment building on Q St. was razed in 2016 and the new DC Dream Center was built.
One person at a time, the DC Dream Center inspires youth and adults to dare to dream, equipping them to reach their God-given potential. DCDC encompasses a spectrum of programs from low-barrier after-school activities and tutoring, to programs that offer deeper engagement such as one-on-one mentoring. They serve the needs of Wards 7 and 8 through a holistic approach, caring for the mind, body, and spirit of individuals and communities.
Always listening to community members about their needs, the Dream Center was built to order for many of the programs that SWWH had been offering for decades. During the pandemic, the Center repurposed to give out more than one million pounds of food and more than 64,000 free meals.
DCDC is a true community partner, working with Howard University on ending opioid addiction; with the Community Service Agency Building Futures Program, DC City government, and others. For hundreds of individuals, DCDC has been an incubator for hope to become habit.
As NCC continued to grow, it became clear that a larger venue would be needed.
Repairing and rerouting streetcars across the nation’s capital for the Capital Transit Company, the Navy Yard Car Barn was the service garage and turnaround for DC streetcars for nearly a century. After 1962, various entities rented the aging facility until, through a series of miracles, NCC purchased it in August 2014. To be completed in multiple phases, the goal was to build something that would meet the needs of the city.
NCC began holding services in the first completed portion of the venue on June 30, 2019. Gatherings came to an abrupt halt due to the global pandemic just nine months later, and the doors were closed by city ordinance for the next 13 months.
In addition to the many ministry and church needs, the historic car barn has been turned into a state-of-the-art event venue with a variety of versatile spaces for hosting retreats, corporate meetings, conferences, weddings, parties and other social events. Phase 2 completed a state-of-the-art child care center to answer the call of city officials for additional child care facilities in the city. The final phase will include an open hall marketplace where incubators of new ideas can launch and grow their dreams.
In 2020, we consolidated several of our campuses into one to better serve our Northern Virginia family.
Currently meeting at the Waterford Event Center in Springfield, our NoVA campus is so centrally located that it’s easy to get to for people everywhere from Alexandria or McLean to Fairfax and Manassas. Our NoVA campus is close enough to DC to facilitate all-church gatherings such as House of Prayer. We are excited for all that is to come at National Community Church’s home base in Northern Virginia!
In August of 2021, Pastor Mark was on a silent retreat. The Spirit said to him, in no uncertain terms, “My house will be called a HOUSE OF PRAYER.”
The Lord said, “Mark, if this church, National Community Church, is a House of Prayer–if you prioritize prayer, if organize around prayer–I’ll turn it into a house of HEALING, a house of MIRACLES, a house of DREAMS.”
“What do you do with a prompting like that?,” says Pastor Mark. “You OBEY it.”
In 2022, we launched House of Prayer on Thursday nights. It sets the tone, sets the table, sets the pace for NCC. We also moved into our new offices with an UPPER ROOM–a space devoted to prayer. And we continue to gather in the UPPER ZOOM as well.
The bottom line? Prayer is the way we write history before it happens. We continue to emphasize our calling as a House of Prayer and invite you to join us.
For the past two decades, National Community Church has launched locations, planted churches, started businesses, and sent missionaries.
In 2021, we realized that it was time to turn ourselves inside out and seed the dreams of the next generation.
That’s why we launched The Dream Collective on January 14, 2022. The Dream Collective is our engine where we help church leaders, pastors, entrepreneurs, and artists turn their visions into tangible realities. We want to give a blessing and a birthright to the dreamers who long for revival in the church, reformation in the kingdom, and renaissance in culture. We want to inspire the next generation to write better books, tell better stories, produce better movies, compose better music, draft better legislation, and build better businesses.