Love this church!!…read more Have never been anywhere that was more welcoming and life-giving! Would highly recommend!

I have been going to this church for over 6 years. My family and I love it, the worship is powerful…read morethe Holy Spirit dwells there. The staff are amazing, very welcoming, and joyful. I love this church because it is full of all ages and types of people worshiping and serving the Lord together. This church has many small groups where life long connections are made. They have outreach teams that serve their community regularly. Overall this is my home church, the community of believers there helped me and encouraged me when I was struggling with my mental health.

Wonderful people. Love the music and preachers.Went there until my husband got dementia and un able…read moreto get out.

My fiance and I are an interfaith couple (I'm Catholic, he's Assembly of God). We were required to…read morego since we want a Catholic blessing for our marriage (really, it was to appease my mom). To be honest, we were ready to fight this whole experience. I mean, seriously, I went in with the worst attitude and was fully prepared to just go through the bare minimum emotions to get our certificate of completion. It actually turned out to be way more beneficial than I could ever expect. Here's the breakdown of our experience: Food: What we were served Saturday was not the same quality of what we were served Sunday. It was night and day. Saturday's eggs looked like Egg Beaters. Sunday's were delicious. Saturday's bread didn't have much flavor. Sunday morning's bread was something special you'd have like Christmas morning. Saturday was "pepperoni spaghetti." Sunday was fried chicken. You get the picture. To be fair, the retreat center was brand spanking new. Room situations: You do not share a room with your fiance (surprise to me at first, but then I'm like "duh, these are Catholics we're talking about.") I was put in a room with 2 other girls who were perfectly normal people and were really nice. One of my roommates actually had a fiance who was my fiance's roommate so we ended up eating all our meals together. We made two new friends, so that was a bonus :) Time: Be prepared to be devoted to this retreat. You get some breaks, but they're short. You will get up early and stay up late. Cost: $275-$290 depending on if you're getting married in the state or not (we're not). I hear there are scholarships available if the price is too high. Presentations: There were two presenting couples. One had been married for 30 years+. The other 10 years+. Both with lots of kids. They were very nice and welcoming. Some of the topics were more interesting than others (NFP-Natural Family Planning- turned out to be one of the most interesting for us). Every topic, of course, went back to religion and God, but they were very relevant topics, including raising a family to handling finances. Workbooks: Yes, you are given workbooks. What happens is the couples have a presentation on, say, finances. They talk about their own experience as a married couple. Then they ask the couple's to be in separate rooms and write out answers to questions in the book. This seems really tedious, and, I'm not going to lie it is intense. But my fiance and I learned a lot about each other. Overall, my fiance and I were very happy with our experience. We were able to take a break from wedding planning (which was very much needed) and just focus on us as we prepare to get married. My best piece of advice is to have a positive attitude and take the retreat seriously. That mindset definitely helped us.

This place is underrated . Drove past many times and never stopped til today . Went to a lovely…read moremass this morning in a beautiful church on Divine Mercy Sunday . After we toured the grounds . Much bigger . It has a college attached .grave yard , grotto . Need at least an hour here . Spent 2.5 hours including mass .

You really should visit Ava Maria Grotto in Cullman, or "little Jerusalem" as we called it when we…read morewere growing up. Admission is $10.00 per adult, Teens (13-17): $8; Children (5-12): $7; Seniors/AAA/AARP: $8; Military/Veterans/1st Responders: $7; Children 4 and under: Free. There have been Groupon offers in the past, also. The stone and concrete models are the work of Brother Joseph Zoettl, a Benedictine monk of St. Bernard Abbey, who devoted ~50 years to reproducing/replicating architectures and things like Noah's ark, the colosseum in Rome, Spanish missions, and other historic Christian buildings and displays and secular recreations including the Alamo, the leaning tour of Pisa, German castles, South African shrines, Hansel and Gretel's Temple of the Fairies (complete with a "caged" dragon). Having not visited most, if not all of the actual sites, himself, Br. Zoettl used 300 postcards he owned and I imagine, books, as points of reference for his designs. The film, "Brother Joseph and the Grotto," was released in 2013. Plan to spend from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours including spending time in the gift shop. I can't give 5 stars because the grotto is not wheelchair accessible, and I think that is a sad shame!