A community is slowly picking up the pieces and carrying on after a fire destroyed St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Morinville last week.
Greg Fraser, pastor of The Father’s House church, which rented space at St. Andrews, said people are settling in and coming to terms with the loss.
“It’ll take us a few months to recover,” he admitted.
“You go to grab a piece of paper you knew you were working on, and it’s not there. You go to grab a book you were working on and it’s gone … you realize it’s a new day and you have to start again.”
Since the fire, youth fellowship nights have been moved to the Morinville Alliance Church for the summer and temporary offices have been set up in the church’s Christian school located at the west end of town. Sunday services are continuing at the Morinville Community Cultural Centre.
Despite the damage the fire caused, little miracles have shone through, Fraser said. This included a damaged disk drive that housed information about several church sites in Morinville, Rochester and Bon Accord, which church officials were told could not be recovered.
“The funny thing is, we brought it back and prayed over it, plugged it in and it worked! We were able to get all the data off of it when the experts couldn’t,” said Fraser. “It was a huge blessing.”
A hand-written copy of the Bible by members of the congregation was another item church members rescued from the rubble.
Similarly, the Anglican Church salvaged baptismal, confirmation registries and a few photo albums. The majority of St. Andrew’s church records were kept at the provincial archives.
Church officials said they hope to get the estimated cost of damage soon, but talks with the insurance companies are being delayed due to the flooding in southern Alberta.
RCMP believe the fire originated in the storage shed at the back of the church and are treating it as suspicious.
