Old churches find new purpose

From The Guardian-

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. 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, as when Donald Conrad became the first baby baptized in the church, which had been built in the late 1800s.

So is the altar, behind which Rhoda Conrad, Mary Lohnes, Maurice Conrad and Stella Forbes at one time or another played the organ.

More here-

http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/living/old-churches-find-new-purpose-233181/