As people race through the last stretch before Christmas, buying last-minute gifts and travelling to see loved ones, a Saint John church has received the best gift it could have asked for: a new home.
The Saint Andrew and Saint David United Church sold its building in the fall and, after a short but thorough search, has taken over a space in the Admiral Beatty building.
“We’re really pleased to be in here,” said Terre Hunter, chair of the church’s board of trustees.
“Our objective that we gave to the contractor when they started was we’d really like to be in here for Christmas, and they have worked really, really hard to get us in here so we’re really appreciative of their work.”
About 50 people gathered for the first service in the new church on Sunday. Hunter says the congregation normally numbers between 30 and 40, which was one reason for the move from its massive Germain Street church.
“We’re small in numbers. The building needs a lot of maintenance and so it was a case of dollars and cents, first of all,” he said.
“Also, we didn’t really need a big building. We certainly need some space but not the big space that we had.”
Get breaking National news
The old church, which at one point could seat about 900 people, was built in 1879 after the great fire of Saint John. Hunter says the developer who purchased the building would like to try and preserve it, providing some comfort to the congregation.
“The owners are very much interested in historic preservation of the building so I don’t think you’ll see it come down,” he said.
“It was certainly a concern of some of the folks in our congregation, and we tried to stress (that) we can’t control what happens to the building but certainly, yes, it is something folks are happy with, that it looks like the building is going to stay.”
Peter Jollymore, who has been a member of the church since 1967, says the old space, while beautiful, was just too much for the congregation to maintain.
“It’s going to be great to be in this new space. It’s nice and bright, it feels warm,” he said.
“I think it will let us focus on what we want to be about as a Christian community as opposed to worrying about the building.”
WATCH: Community left reeling after fire guts 114-year-old church
Jollymore says the church has always had a strong outward focus, but the challenges in maintaining the old church began to interfere with the community goals of the group in recent years.
“Historically, we’ve always had a strong kind of outward approach to the community and wanting to be involved in the community, and I think this will really let us re-energize that focus,” he said.
When he began attending the church, Jollymore says the pews would seat between 300 and 400 people on an average Sunday, but over time its numbers have dwindled to a tenth of that. Jollymore says that the church doesn’t have the same role in the community that it had in the past.
“When I look back at the history of our church and a lot of the other churches in the [area], they were the kind of centre of activity in the community,” he said.
“If you went back in the ’20s and ’30s, our church had a gymnasium so they had basketball games, they had dances because there just weren’t other places to go and do that kind of thing. Today, there’s so many options for people to experience different things and come together in different ways.”
Comments