CASHMERE — Upon this rock, they will build their ... bam, it’s done.

In just 12 days, a new church for Jehovah’s Witnesses rose here on a rocky site just outside town when hundreds of volunteers crafted a brand new Kingdom Hall, the Cashmere congregation’s first in almost four decades.

Construction time — an “accelerated build” common for Jehovah’s churches but rare in the Wenatchee Valley — stretched out over four three-day weekends in October as mostly local tradespeople, volunteering from their regular jobs, received assistance from crews as far away as Spokane and the Tri-Cities.

And get this: The 4,000-square-foot, $600,000 project was only half of the crews’ building efforts in October. Many of the same workers, during the same month, using the same fast-fabrication techniques, built a second Kingdom Hall in Republic, a mining town about four hours northeast of the Wenatchee Valley. That building, too, was expected to be completed Nov. 1.

“Working together and helping one another is part of being a member of our church,” said Steve Hazen, a Cashmere church elder and one of the local project’s coordinators. “Even when things got frustrating, we remembered that we’re brothers and sisters working together, shoulder to shoulder, to reach a worthwhile goal — to build this beautiful new church.”

In Cashmere, the Kingdom Hall will house two separate congregations, one with services in English (about 100 members) and one with services in Spanish (about 50 members). The separate services are timed so congregations — leaving and arriving — overlap a bit so folks can socialize. The congregations have been meeting at Kingdom Halls in Wenatchee and East Wenatchee since their own meeting hall was sold several years ago in anticipation of a new location. They’d outgrown the old location and needed more parking for their growing numbers of church members.

Last weekend, about 150 volunteers pushed to complete the building’s remaining phases — 20,000 bricks on the outside, and inside a few miles of wiring for lights and sound equipment, plumbing fixtures for the slate-and-tile bathrooms, trim on the church auditorium’s stage and pulpit.

If all went according to plan, Hazen said they should have their first service in the new church by Sunday. If delays occur, the first Sunday service would be Nov. 15, he said.

“It’s amazing,” laughed Hazen, pointing last Friday to teams of electricians working to wire the auditorium ceiling . “Three weekends ago, this was a flat foundation, and now we’re talking about holding the first service. I find this kind of cooperations and teamwork to be inspirational.”

Worldwide, the Jehovah Witnesses have more than 103,200 congregations with just over 7 million practicing members. The United States has more than 1 million practicing members across all 50 states. The church is widely known for its door-to-door evangelism and distribution of its two international magazines, The Watchtower and Awake!

In this state, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have three Regional Building Committees that oversee construction of churches, offices and other buildings. Every year, the RBC in Eastern Washington funnels crews to numerous projects and encourages volunteers to participate in distant relief efforts that might include rehab and construction assignments.

Volunteer Brian McNeill, whose family owns Set in Stone Custom Masonry in Wenatchee, has used his brick-laying and stone skills on projects in Nicaragua and Burundi, a small country in eastern Africa. McNeill is a member of Cashmere’s Spanish-speaking Jehovah congregation, an effort on his part to keep his language skills finely tuned.

Another volunteer, Veronika Bourgault, a Cashmere accountant, volunteered her new building skills in New Orleans in 2006 to help rebuild homes and clean up neighborhoods in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Now, she benefits from the Jehovah’s fast-build projects, she said, by training to be an electrician.

“We benefit, sure, from these volunteer efforts,” said Hazen. “But they learn skills that’ll serve them well and also the community at large. It’s cooperation at its best.”

Mike Irwin: 665-1179

irwin@wenatcheeworld.com