Last year when new custodians began working at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Little Rock they spotted a troubling sign others had missed - termites.
“Ordinarily you don’t see them but one got loose and they saw it on the floor,” said the Rev. Danny Schieffler.
Schieffler called Terminix, the church’s longtime pest control company, and what they found after inspecting the building was a shock.
“It was almost a biblical plague,” Schieffler said. “The damage was so bad the structural engineer said, ‘You can’t worship here anymore. It’s not safe.’ We’re fortunate we got out. There could have been a catastrophic failure.”
Termites had worked their way inside the laminated wood beams supporting the vaulted roof, making the sanctuary unsafe to use. The congregation moved worship services to the much smaller parish hall while the team decided what to do with the building. The damage was so extensive there was talk of removing the roof to do repairs.
“Our initial reaction was fear and a little bit of apprehension because we had just put a new roof on in 2010 and it was a huge capital campaign to do that,” said Kathy Roberts, lay ministries coordinator. “The thought of having to tear the roof off was horrible.”
Schieffler said it took several weeks to determine the extent of the damage and it was an emotionally upsetting time for parishioners. There was fear that the cost of repairs would be so high that tearing down the church and rebuilding would be the better alternative.
“It was very comforting once we knew it could be fixed and that Terminix would pay for it,” Schieffler said.
Schieffler said the church had a contract with Terminix from the day the church was built 49 years ago, so the cost of repairs was covered.
“We had a termite contract, but even with a contract they miss them sometimes. Things happen. They didn’t hesitate to take responsibility,” he said, noting that the termites did more than $300,000 worth of damage.
Crews shored up the structure with large support beams so the sanctuary would be safe for the work team. Workers then cleaned out the damaged wood in the beams and injected them with epoxy. They also installed steel plates at the bottom of the beams to strengthen them. The team also installed wooden cover boards to hide the steel and a painter was called in to make the cover boards match the rest of the beams in appearance.
“When you walk, in unless you knew about it, you would never realize it had ever been damaged,” Schieffler said.
The team also sealed the 50-rank pipe organ so it wouldn’t be damaged by dust during repairs and also had it cleaned and reassembled once repairs were complete.
The congregation was displaced for 10 months, crammed into the parish hall for services. The sanctuary has seating for 600 and the parish hall can hold a little more than half that. The normal Sunday crowd of 360 could fit comfortably in the sanctuary with plenty of space to spare, but the parish hall was another matter.
“It was shoulder to shoulder and that was very different,” Roberts said.
Schieffler said learning to worship in a different space was a challenge.
“Spiritually there are a lot of parallels between this and the biblical experience of people being in the wilderness, when they didn’t have all the usual external supports to help them in their worship,” he said.
Schieffler said he views the forced relocation as a blessing in disguise.
“We’ve all had to sit in a different place and we saw people we never saw in the sanctuary. People have loved that,” he said. “We got to see people’s faces. There’s a sense of intimacy now in the congregation we didn’t have before.”
In addition to less seating, the atmosphere was also different, with no stained glass windows, no pipe organ to accompany the singing and most distressing, no kneelers.
“Episcopalians love to kneel and pray and we haven’t been able to in 10 months,” Schieffler said.
While the project was going on, Schieffler said they took advantage of the time to make other improvements. The doors to the sanctuary were painted red, a traditional welcoming color of the Episcopal Church. Beveled glass was installed near the doors and LED lighting was installed throughout the church.
“We tried to seize the opportunity,” he said.
On Sunday, the congregation will be back in the sanctuary for the first time since repairs were completed.
“The first thing we want to do is acknowledge the grace we have experienced,” Schieffler said. “We had a parish hall to go to and a lot of churches don’t. We’ll thank the workmen … we’ll have a lot of thanksgivings to offer.”
The congregation will then go outside to begin the Palm Sunday liturgy with a procession into the sanctuary.
“It will just be good to be back in the church again,” Schieffler said. “It will be like going home.”
For some, it will be their first time in the sanctuary.
“There are new people at St. Mark’s who have never been in the other building, so it will be a totally new experience for them,” Roberts said. “There’s been a lot of growth in a lot of ways but I think everybody is ready to be back.”
Schieffler said the experience has made the congregation much more flexible. They’ve learned to work together and to not be so attached to the usual way of doing things.
“At first people were very distressed by it. It was a spiritual crisis for us, but a good one as it turns out. It caused us to stop and think, ‘What is a church?’ ‘Why are we here?’” he said. “We’ve learned we can serve God anywhere.”
He also thinks they can learn something from the termites.
“I think they have something to teach Christians about the amazing things they can accomplish when they all work together,” Schieffler said. “Those little guys, they did a lot.”
Religion, Pages 12 on 04/12/2014