The Church of Eleven22 has filed plans to build a two-story, 44,928-square-foot worship facility inside the Shoppes of Valley Ridge shopping center in Ponte Vedra, moving to replace its temporary Sunday setup at a local high school with a permanent campus along one of St. Johns County's busiest corridors.
According to an application detailed by the Jacksonville Daily Record, the church would occupy the shopping center's undeveloped Building 200 site, an empty lot at 10850 U.S. 1 North flanked by existing retail buildings near County Road 210 West. The filing lists Langan Engineering & Environmental Services Inc. as the project consultant, and the application was submitted this month, per the newspaper's reporting.
The church currently holds Sunday services at Ponte Vedra High School on Davis Park Road, a temporary campus that opened January 7, 2024, according to The Church of Eleven22 itself. A permanent building at Shoppes of Valley Ridge would let the congregation move off the weekend school rental and into a dedicated worship space.
Why the Church Needs a Zoning Green Light
The shopping center's current zoning does not permit the church's proposed use. The property falls under the Pope Site Planned Unit Development, enacted under Ordinance No. 2019-37, which rezoned roughly 11.99 acres from Open Rural to PUD and allows up to 94,000 square feet of standard commercial use, per the Daily Record's review of county records. Because the shopping center's present use is retail and commercial, the church's plan requires a minor PUD modification.
The seating capacity the church is planning is what triggers that requirement. With a capacity exceeding 1,000 people, the proposed facility would qualify as a large place of assembly under Section 2.03.12(c) of the county's Land Development Code, the newspaper reported. Under county procedure, a PUD modification like this one goes through the county Planning and Zoning Agency and does not require action by the full Board of County Commissioners unless an affected party appeals the PZA's decision, according to the Daily Record. As of August 31, no PZA hearing had yet been scheduled.
A Fast-Growing Church Running Out of Room
The Church of Eleven22 traces its roots to 2012, when it began as a single service at Beach United Methodist Church in Jacksonville Beach under founding lead pastor Joby Martin. It has since grown to more than a dozen campuses across Northeast Florida and South Georgia, with locations in Arlington, Baymeadows, Fleming Island, Mandarin, North Jacksonville, Orange Park, Palatka, Ponte Vedra, San Pablo and St. Augustine, spanning Duval, Clay and St. Johns counties. The church also lists prison ministry campuses, and it names Riverside-area Jacksonville and Orlando as coming-soon locations.
That growth has been dramatic even by megachurch standards. Outreach Magazine's 2026 Outreach 100 report ranked The Church of Eleven22 as the fastest-growing church in the country after its weekly attendance jumped to 29,367, a single-year increase of 7,734 worshippers, or 36% growth. The scale of its active membership was also on display in mid-2026, when the church organized a mass baptism in Jacksonville Beach where more than 2,500 people were baptized in the Atlantic Ocean before an estimated shoreline crowd of 14,000, according to a post on the church's Facebook page.
Embedding Worship Centers in Retail Corridors
Building inside a shopping center is not a new strategy for the church. It first repurposed commercial real estate in 2012, transforming a former Walmart on Beach Boulevard into its primary San Pablo campus, part of a broader pattern in Jacksonville where contemporary non-denominational churches acquire commercial buildings even as traditional mainline churches downsize, the Daily Record has reported. The Ponte Vedra proposal fits that same formula, and the church is currently replicating it elsewhere: it has purchased 10.5 acres in the Wildlight master-planned community in Nassau County to build a 40,000-square-foot worship center expected to hold more than 1,000 people upon completion this year, according to Wildlight's own announcement. The church has also set an October 2026 launch date for its first Central Florida campus in Orlando.
Commercial space of the size the church needs is increasingly hard to come by in the Jacksonville market. Cushman & Wakefield's retail tracking found that only 14 retail spaces of 40,000 square feet or larger were available across the entire metro area at the end of 2025, underscoring how scarce large-format sites have become as the church seeks its next anchor location.
A Corridor Reshaped by Growth
The Shoppes of Valley Ridge sits in a section of St. Johns County that has changed rapidly. The county's population reached 346,328 in July 2025 after growing 26% over five years, with much of that growth concentrated along northern corridors like County Road 210 and U.S. 1, where master-planned communities have added tens of thousands of home entitlements, per data reported by the St. Johns Citizen. The shopping center's other tenants include Tillman's Meats & Country Store, House of Coffee, Body Fit Training, and Nara Revolving Sushi Bar, which opened in August 2026 as St. Johns County's first conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, according to Totally St. Augustine.
The Ponte Vedra filing follows other recent moves by the church to expand its physical footprint in the Jacksonville area, including a 10-year takeover of The Glass Factory near downtown, a long-term agreement signed in April to upgrade and gain exclusive use of the industrial event venue for ministry programming. Whether the Ponte Vedra plan advances will depend on when the county schedules a PZA hearing, and whether traffic or parking concerns during that review draw community feedback, a question the Daily Record's reporting notes remains open for now.
