This update comes from a video we recorded in November 2022, the year we took ownership of the building. Some of the plans and timelines in it have changed since. For where things stand now, start at the main page.
At the end of 2022 we launched our year-end campaign with a phrase that surfaced during a prayer meeting: moving at glacial speed. We said it first as a lament. Things weren’t moving as fast as we wanted them to. The longer we prayed about it, the more it sounded like a description of how God has worked through Dream Center. Glaciers are slow, and they reshape the land they move across.
The first big dream we shared that season was the Ambassador Hotel, and Brett recorded this video standing in front of it.
A building older than most of the city
Franklin Heald, one of the founders of Lake Elsinore, built it in 1887. Early City Council meetings were held upstairs, and the first Elsinore High School class met there. After World War II it was remodeled into the building you see today, and it ran as the Ambassador Hotel for decades, with a restaurant and rooms, until it was shut down in 1992. It has been boarded up ever since.
How it started
In 2008, Brett was driving past City Park, saw the brokenness there and the boarded-up hotel across the street, and started praying that someone would start a Dream Center in Lake Elsinore. Over time the prayer changed. It became “Lord, let me start one.” In 2014 a small group of us began meeting on the rocks out front, week in and week out, to pray for this property. We didn’t know how it would happen. We believed God would deliver it.
We love the name. Scripture calls followers of Jesus ambassadors for Christ, and we want this building to work something like an embassy: a place where the church shines brightly in Lake Elsinore, and where people whose lives have been broken are rebuilt and sent back out into the city to bring renewal to it.
What we hoped to build
After seven years of praying and contending for the property, it became ours. In the video Brett describes the plan as it stood then: four floors and 39 rooms, a full diner, classrooms, an enclosed blacktop out back, and a rooftop view from the highest point downtown. He also talked about bringing back the tower that was removed in the 1940s remodel, as a tip of the hat to the city’s history.
The rooms were always meant for men and women going through a structured program of recovery, life skills, and spiritual formation, living in Christian community. People are most broken in isolation. The goal was a place where they would build healthy, lasting relationships while they rebuild their lives, and leave ready to serve the city that helped them.
In late 2022 we were in the middle of the permitting process, and Brett was honest that it was daunting. He hoped we would break ground the following year. It has gone far slower than any of us expected, and the reasons are in The Whole Story of the Ambassador Project.
What we asked for then was prayer for the permits, for favor with the city, and for strength and endurance for our team. We said we were in this for the long haul, because consistency is what wins the day in a project like this. That hasn’t changed.
