It’s hard to say no to a $10 price tag, especially when it comes attached to a church worth nearly a quarter-million dollars with 125 years of history. Generations Community Church in Wellesley, formally AppleTree Community Church, paid just that for the Westhills Mennonite Fellowship Church’s former property in Lisbon.
![While the outside of the building will look much the same, the inside will be completely gutted and modernized.[Whitney Neilson / The Observer]](https://www.observerxtra.com/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/post_church.jpg)
Westhills was given the church by the United Church of Canada years ago when their church in Baden burned down and the United Church was closing. Now, they’re returning the favour.
Pastor Mark LaRonde said their generosity is something they’ll always be grateful for, as they’ve been running their church service out of the Wellesley Community Centre.
“We really connected with the generations of Christians that built that place,” LaRonde said. “We just felt that they prayed that this would be a place of worship for generations to come. Instead of Westhills selling it off for someone to build a house or something it will continue to be a Christian place of worship.”
Generations Community Church began as a house church with a handful of people two years ago. The group started from families in Wellesley who wanted a modern worship service that was intimate and close to home.
“We’re a contemporary Christian church service, probably the only one in the area, surrounded by more traditional churches. We were different in our contemporariness,” LaRonde said.
The church they’re making their new home is on the corner of Road 104 and Line 45, which may seem like the middle of nowhere, but it’s really only four minutes out of Lisbon. For some of the congregation, it’s actually closer than travelling to the community centre.
Generations church members had been searching for a permanent location for months when LaRonde heard that Westhills had bought the Emporium in Baden.
“I would drive around the community looking for a possible building, and as I’m driving through Wellesley it’s so small that you run out of opportunities,” LaRonde said. “I started driving a little bit further out into the countryside. And I remember coming across this little 125-year-old church just on the edge of Wellesley. That was where Westhills Fellowship Church was. A light came on.”
The outside of the building will remain much the same. The only real change planned as of yet is to refinish the doors. But the inside will look nothing like its former self. LaRonde says they’ve envisioned it to be like walking into a Starbucks coffee shop.
Where there were once pews, will be tables. Members of Westhills are taking some of the pews as keepsakes and selling the rest. They’ll be ripping up the carpet and refinishing the floors. Panelling will be torn down and new drywall put up in the foyer, with bright colours replacing the beige walls.
It’s expected to be mostly complete by Easter.
“This one was built by professional tradespeople back in those days so they would have paid a fortune to have it built back then,” LaRonde said. “We want to honour those people that built that building and take the heritage of what they’ve done and take it forward into the next generation to come.”
Renting space from the community centre meant LaRonde and his congregation had to get creative. The space would get rented out for other functions a few times a year, so they’d end up setting up a tent outside. They also couldn’t keep all their equipment there, which meant trucking it all there and back each week.
“It was a lot of work, and we’re not going to miss that,” LaRonde said. “It’s very stressful for everybody to come in on Sunday morning and set up the whole place.”
He says this extra time will free them up to do other work in the community, hold prayer groups and bible studies.
LaRonde previously had his own business in building supplies, which he sold in 2008 to become a pastor. He went to Heritage Seminary in his mid-40s. He also served with the Mission Christian Alliance, is an ordained reverend with the Evangelical Christian Church of Canada and a credentialed Christian counsellor.
While some people have come through their church and said they’d consider joining the congregation if it was larger, LaRonde said he doesn’t think their church will always be so small. As for Wellesley, he sees the township going through a transition from an agricultural rural community to a bedroom community.
“It’s in an in-between situation, so you’ve got all of these young families moving in and they’ve moved out to small town and some of them are Christians and they want to worship in their own town,” LaRonde said.
Both congregations will hold a joint service at 9:45 a.m. at the Lisbon property on February 8. Generations’ first worship in their new home is February 15 at 10:30 a.m. Everyone is invited for the service, a potluck lunch, and to work on renovations afterwards.
“We believe that we’re in that church to be that next generational tool of God to reach a community that is getting younger,” LaRonde said. “We feel a part of that.”
