Peter Smith
An 11-year-old Islamic school, seeking room for expansion, has purchased a former church's building in the Buechel area for $750,000.
Nur Islamic School of Louisville reached an agreement Sept. 22 with trustees of the former Midlane Park Baptist Church to purchase the property at 6500 Six Mile Lane.
It plans to use it for a school, mosque and community center.
The church building sits on a 7.1-acre parcel and has 35,776 square feet of building space, according to the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator's database. The building, which was built in 1962, has space for worship, classrooms and offices.
The purchase will provide more space for the Islamic school, which has been operating out of a house and portable classrooms on Buechel Bank Road and other rented space, according to a board member and former president, Mustafa Mohamed. He said the school would likely move to the new building in phases.
Midlane Park Baptist Church merged in February with nearby Buechel Park Baptist Church, which had originally created the Midlane Park church nearly a half-century ago, according to Susan Clifton, trustee for the latter congregation.
Clifton said the Midlane Park congregation had reached a peak attendance of about 175 to 200 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. More recently, it had about 40 active members, many of them elderly, and that led to the decision to merge.
"Everything went fine" in the negotiations with the Islamic school, she said.
"We were selling a building," she said, adding that the church's ministry lives on through the Buechel Park church.
Mohamed said leaders of the former church are "very cooperative" and that a neighbor recently offered to help the school as needed. He said the school has not met any of the type of resistance that some proposed new mosques have received around the state and nation in recent months. "Most of the people there are friendly," he said.
The move is also the latest sign of the growing institutional presence of Islam locally, which now has at least eight mosques, some of which opened in the past decade, and two Islamic schools. On Westport Road, for example, the Muslim Community Center of Louisville's ongoing construction of a domed mosque represents the boldest architectural expression of Islam in the city to date.
October 12, 2010, Courier journal
