Finding new purpose for old churches
Buildings being turned into residences, businesses and more
Like many of us, I suppose, I hadn’t been inside a church on a Sunday in a long time.
Yet there I was recently as sunlight filtered through the stained glass and filled the rafters of the old St. Paul’s Anglican Church in the village of Cherry Hill, trying to keep a 43-kilogram dog with a wandering attention span from crashing into the tables of old glassware, the vintage toys and the nautical curios.
Teena Coolen tells me she hasn’t changed much inside the church since she bought it, price undisclosed, from the Anglican Diocese five years back. “I had to do some repairs, of course,” she explained. “The community couldn’t handle the upkeep; there weren’t enough people going to church and putting money into the collection plate.”
But the pews are still there, the same ones, perhaps, when Donald Conrad became the first baby baptized in the church, which had been built in the late 1800s. So is the altar, and behind which Rhoda Conrad, Mary Lohnes, Maurice Conrad and Stella Forbes at one time or another played the organ.
Some of the people who enter Teena’s Tiques are antique hunters. Some of them are old-timers from the area.
Some just wonder whether buildings can have spirits, too. And whether there’s still something breathtaking about a house of God when it becomes something else altogether.
Anyone who drives around this province can check this theory out because churches, for so long the centre of many communities, are closing like never before.
There are a variety of reasons for this including rural depopulation and declining church attendance.
The good news is instead of just calling in the demo guys, churches are being transformed using an architectural concept called adaptive reuse, which says it’s OK, sometimes even preferable, to reuse an old structure for a new purpose.
And so we have a church that is a full-time museum in Sydney and one that is a part-time bookstore in Port Maitland.
Churches have been turned into a concert space on Pictou Island, a tea house in Weymouth and an antiques showcase in Great Village.
Instead of choir practice and Sunday school, churches now house all kinds of businesses from selling pet supplies in Windsor Junction to running a karate dojo in Amherst to housing a winery in Newport.
In bigger places, churches have been re- purposed into condo buildings and summer cottages, or even full-year residences.
In Bridgetown, Cindy MacDonald, another church owner, counts her blessings.
When she bought the town’s Presbyterian church-turned Masonic Temple in 2009, her idea was to convert it into a wedding venue.
Then she added a business partner and expanded to include a catering business and a bar.
So far so good at Temple on Queen.
But that’s not all that’s sweet about owning a re- purposed church.
First opened in 1871, it was bought by the local Masonic Lodge 50 years later, which meant for half a century only Masons got to see the church’s stunning Gothic revival architecture.
Now, anybody who enters the building sees the spires, columns and pointed arches that inspire a little awe and maybe something else, too.
“It’s been a real (crappy) year for me,” says Macdonald. But inside that old, beautiful building there are times, particularly when alone, that she experiences something that she can only describe as peace.