A Canadian church gets shipped to a small town in Louisiana

December 30, 2013

By Andrea Crossan

The All Saints Church stood in Nova Scotia before it was dismantled and shipped to Louisiana.
Annapolis Royal Heritage Society

A congregation in Louisiana was looking for a new church. They found one on the market in rural Nova Scotia.

"We began looking for a church in the Mississippi delta that we could rejuvenate, and maybe someone had one that was dilapidate that we could redo," said Louisiana Church Pastor Jerel Keene. "I began looking on online."

What he found was nowhere near the Mississippi Delta. Pastor Keene spotted an ad for the All Saints Church. In 2005, the 200-year-old church was one of seven rural Anglican churches that were selected for closure because of Nova Scotia’s plummeting rural population.

"I flew up there and got to look at the church," Keene. "The inside had been gutted. They had taken the floors and the pews but the building itself was impressive. I thought, man, this is better than I ever imagined."

So, the congregation of Abita Springs, La., bought the church and had it shipped south earlier this month. It was put, beam by beam, onto a flatbed truck and driven more than 3,000 miles to its new home on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

"One thing about our day and age is that we can move pretty much anything for just about peanuts," Keene said. "It wasn't very much at all. It was about $9,000 to get it down here.

Keene is looking forward to expanding his congregation with the new, albeit used, church.

The Southern Baptist congregation expects to have the building erected, outfitted with new siding and plaster and opened in time for Easter Sunday.