Recycling Faith's Domicile

"It's something that we're going to take care of. We have a pianist, he's really good ... he really knows how to jazz up our hymns.
"This is still the South; we love the Lord down here. I envisioned a white church, big steeple, the whole thing, and this just fell in our lap.'
Pastor Jerel Keene, Louisiana Church

Ryan Scranton    For the remaining congregants of All Saints Church, said the Rector, “the options were either we take the building down ourselves and put a cairn on the spot, or we find someone who’s going to take the building away entirely.”

"Folks here were sad to lose the building, but pleased that the building would be rebuilt somewhere else and used as a church. Difficult decisions these."
Rev. Canon Ken Vaughan, rector of Annapolis

Travis and Maggie Charlie    The church, now little more than a jigsaw puzzle of wooden beams stacked onto the back of a flatbed truck, pulled into Abita Springs, Louisiana only a few hours before Christmas.

 

It's an unprepossessing, but picturesque, typical Canadian Anglican church; white clapboard, steeple, simple in its charm and readily recognizable. Built two hundred years ago, Nova Scotia's All Saints Church has left Canada, and is preparing to be "resurrected" over 3,200 kilometres distant from where it has made its home for the past two centuries, in Louisiana.

Mind, it hardly resembles a church at the present time. Sitting on a flatbed truck, disassembled, a wooden jigsaw waiting to be reassembled and presented to the waiting parishioners at Abita Springs, Louisiana. It was their Christmas gift to one another, and that's when it arrived; Christmas Day. Now, far from the freezing wet winds that battered it for 200 years, it will bask in the balmy warmth of the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Travis and Maggie Charlie  Wooden beams sent from the All Saints Church in Nova Scotia.

 

The music that blessed its interior, wafting out on waves of hymnal sound to the near surrounds will be far, far different, as well, come the near future. For once the building is erected, new siding and plaster adorning its exterior, the 78-member Southern Baptist congregation anticipates the rollicking music and singing more representative of their version of Christianity to rock forth; no more Anglican hymns; gospel will be the order of the day.

As All Saints Church, located rurally in the community of Granville Centre, it was one of seven Anglican churches to be closed, reflecting the unfortunate plummeting rural population and numbers of dedicated churchgoers. Others were sold off, transformed into private dwellings, another demolished, some burned to the ground as tragedies waiting to happen.

The Catholic Diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia had addressed the sad reality of having to close over a dozen historical rural churches, a reflection of the reality of "fewer priests and less bums in pews". It's not just the Anglican church, but Presbyterian and Catholic churches in the Maritimes that have seen a reduction in use and consequently need.

And it just happened that in the Bayou State church attendance is going the other way; among the highest in the United States, they needed a building to accommodate larger numbers of church goers. Pastor Keene began searching for a period-style building with "lots of character". He searched along the Mississippi Delta, but it was online where he saw the All Saints Church listed by TimberhArt Woodworks, a Nova Scotia wood contractor specializing in selling off reclaimed timber framed East Coast churches.

Pastor Keene felt motivated to fly to Granville Centre for an on-site inspection, and there he came across a "beautiful, beautiful building.  To me, it just seemed to all fit ... I just thought it was awesome -- still do." Its cornerstone date was 1814.