A Sears department store that sat empty on Landis Avenue in Vineland for years has reopened as a church campus seating roughly 950 people. True North Church, a nondenominational congregation based in Mullica Hill, held its first service at the Landis Avenue and Route 47 location on October 4, and the opening caps a renovation that began after the church bought the vacant building for $2.4 million in 2024.
The church chose Vineland after noticing that a large group of people, families, and leaders had been making the drive from the Vineland area to the Mullica Hill campus every week, according to 42 Freeway. Hundreds of Vineland residents had already been attending services at the Mullica Hill site, which overflows most weekends, and the new campus was built to bring worship closer to home for them. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, the Sears building totals nearly 70,000 square feet, of which the church retrofitted 40,000 square feet for its own use.
Before the renovation was finished, True North ran a temporary, mobile Vineland campus out of Lakeside Middle School, where services launched on April 6, 2025, according to the church’s own True North Church website. That arrangement lasted roughly 18 months while construction continued at the former department store a few miles away.
A Big-Box Store Gets a Second Life
The Sears at Landis Avenue and Delsea Drive operated for more than six decades before closing in 2017, along with 65 other Sears and Kmart stores shuttered that year as the retailer’s national footprint collapsed. Sears filed for bankruptcy the following year and now has only five remaining stores nationwide, none in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, per the Inquirer’s reporting. True North purchased the property from the retailer that owns Sears, and nj.com reports the finished campus will include community space alongside a main auditorium built to hold more than 900 people…