St. Philip the Apostle Parish breaks ground on new parish hall

Bishop Michael Olson blesses the ground for a parish hall for St. Philip the Apostle Parish in Flower Mound on April 10, 2025. (courtesy photo/LMP, LLC)

FLOWER MOUND — St. Philip the Apostle Parish in Flower Mound has broken ground on a new two-story, 24,000-square-foot parish hall that will add additional classrooms and meeting space to the church that moved from Lewisville three years ago.

The new structure will be roughly the same size as the church building, which was dedicated Feb. 22, 2022.

To allow the parish to have more frequent opportunities for Eucharistic Adoration, the new parish hall will feature a dedicated Adoration chapel with a confessional and seating for about 30 people.

Sarah Fritcher, director of communications at St. Philip, said the new parish hall "has, at its heart, a very large assembly room that allows our parish community to gather for functions outside of Mass, which is always a key feature of parish campuses across America."

She mentioned activities such as parish dinners, festivals, and speaker events would be held in the building.

Often people go to the same Mass every weekend but never meet most of the families in the parish because they only go to that one Mass, Fritcher observed.

"But when the parish comes together for a single event, this is our opportunity for us to really meet and have fellowship with one another as a community," she said. "This building will help us to do that."

The building has an additional six classrooms upstairs that allow the parish to fulfill its current and future needs for religious education.

"Frankly, we're pretty cramped right now," Fritcher remarked. "We've got four classrooms in our existing facility, and it's a never-ending shuffle in our weekly calendar to help to get all of our meetings into these rooms."

The parish has a lot of groups that want to meet, Fritcher added, and the new rooms will help facilitate that.

The parish raised about $11 million to retire its Phase I construction debt and to build the new facility plus an additional 120 parking spaces, which increases availability by about 40 percent.

"Our diocese requires 65 percent of a project to be raised before it starts," Fritcher said. "Now that we've reached that, we are going to continue fundraising, because our ultimate goal is to complete this building without taking on additional debt."

Fritcher said the church’s fundraising effort was remarkable.

"The fact that we raised almost $11 million in two years set the record in our parish. We didn't even raise this much so quickly when we built the church," Fritcher said.

She credited the leadership of the parish's pastor, Father Raymond McDaniel, for the successful fundraising effort.

"Fr. McDaniel, of course, has been highly instrumental in helping people understand the need that we have to continue expanding the campus and to inspire them to be generous. They've just responded incredibly.

"It's been a huge testament to the generosity and support of all of the people of St. Philip," Fritcher said.