“An Income-Generating Facility”: A Ten-Year-Old Church Opens Its Own Building on Hagley Park Road

• Transformed Life Church opened The Ambassadors at 63 Hagley Park Road in March 2022
• The congregation grew from 58 people at monthly preview services to over 1,000 members
• Its founding pastor said the building is meant to earn income
• Two senators attended the ribbon-cutting

Transformed Life Church marked ten years of ministry in 2022 by opening a building of its own. The facility, called The Ambassadors, at 63 Hagley Park Road in St Andrew, was officially opened with a ribbon-cutting on March 18, 2022, the Gleaner reported.

The congregation’s growth explains the move. It began in 2011 with monthly preview services at the Police Officers’ Club, attended by 58 people. By 2022 it had more than 1,000 regular members worshipping across three weekly services.

Founding pastor Reverend Dwight Fletcher, who started the church with Reverend Joan Fletcher, said permanent premises would change what the ministry could do. “This building is a massive upgrade to our work. The stability it provides will enhance our ability to touch more lives, equip greater numbers, and send these persons and teams out,” he said.

He was also explicit that the building has a commercial purpose. “We envision The Ambassadors as an income-generating facility … This is God’s property to be used as a centre for facilitating transformation,” he said. Senators Peter Bunting and Aubyn Hill were among those at the opening. The Gleaner report did not disclose the cost of the building.

That model — a church building on a major commercial corridor that serves worship and is also meant to earn revenue — is one more Jamaican congregations are considering. It can make a congregation less dependent on offerings, but it also raises practical questions about property tax, the terms of any rentals, insurance and how income is accounted for.

For Jamaican churches that started, as this one did, in borrowed rooms, The Ambassadors shows the path to permanent premises. For diaspora and local investors in church life, it is a reminder to ask how a building will pay for itself after the ribbon is cut.

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