Lakewood's first article covers the 2005 move into the former Compaq Center in a single paragraph; the conversion itself was a fifteen month construction project built inside a building never designed to hold a congregation. The arena opened in 1975 as The Summit, took the Compaq Center name in 1998, and stood empty of professional sports after 2003, when the Rockets moved to Toyota Center, leaving Lakewood a stripped down bowl of an arena rather than any kind of sanctuary to start from.
Church leaders had already signed a thirty year lease with the city in 2001, prepaying eleven million eight hundred thousand dollars up front, before construction on the ninety five million dollar renovation began. Architecture firms Morris Architects, Shaw Architects and Studio RED Architects reworked the arena floor into a sanctuary, adding a five story, three hundred thousand square foot classroom building constructed over an existing public street, a bookstore, a satellite uplink for global broadcast and a lighting rig built to change the room's mood between services. Walter P Moore, the structural engineer who designed the original 1975 arena, returned for the conversion, engineering the same steel frame for a purpose the original design never anticipated.
The lease outlasted its own terms. In March 2010 the Houston City Council voted thirteen to two to sell the building outright to Lakewood for seven and a half million dollars, officials explaining the price reflected the present value of lease payments already owed rather than a fresh appraisal, with the proceeds routed into a general fund facing a twelve million dollar shortfall that year. What had been a publicly owned arena became, inside less than a decade of moving in, a church Lakewood owned outright.