A congregation in Carman, Man., is coming to grips with the loss of their Anglican Lutheran church, a fixture in the community that was ravaged by a fire on Thursday.
Crews from the Carman Dufferin Fire Department were dispatched at around 4:10 a.m. following reports of a fire in the Grace-St. John’s Anglican Lutheran Church in Carman, roughly 75 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg.
Deputy Chief Joey McElroy told CBC roughly 75 per cent of the building’s interior was compromised during the blaze.
“The congregation is very devastated, they’re very upset and they were sorrowful about [it],” Rev. Trudy Thorarinson, the church’s pastor, said on Thursday.
Thorarinson said the church, built in 1965, is the only Anglican Lutheran in the southern Manitoba town with a congregation of roughly 30 families.
“[The fire] is so fresh and it so happens so quickly, right now we’re still just trying to come to grasp,” Thorarinson said.
No injuries reported
McElroy said five pieces of equipment and 18 crew members battled the blaze.
Firefighters tried to enter the church but quickly realized the floor in the front part of the church was missing, so they fought the fire from the outside of the building, McElroy said.
Crews then went inside the building to assess the extent of damage, extinguishing hotspots where the fire had spread. The fire was deemed under control by around 6 a.m.
“[It] took a little while to get in there and figure out where exactly it was burning, as it had spread to so many parts of the church,” McElroy said. “Anytime you’re in a small community and you lose a church, that definitely has a big effect on the community.”
The building was empty at the time of the fire, and no firefighter was was injured.
Two crew members remain on the scene to ensure no hotspots flare up again during the afternoon, McElroy said.
The Office of Fire Commissioner is working to determine the cause of the fire, McElroy said.
When the investigation is completed, the building will be turned back to the church’s board of directors, McElroy said, allowing them to proceed with insurance claims.
Since the fire, the church has received an outpouring of support from inside and outside the congregation, Thorarinson said.
Besides worship services, Grace-St. John’s has worked along with other churches in Carman on community outreach initiatives such as food hampers for the needy.
Thorarinson said the congregation has been offered alternative spaces to worship until the church is repaired.
“We’re still going to gather as a worshipping community on Sunday, it just won’t be in the space we normally meet, but we will still gather because the church is not the building,” Thorarinson said.
With the church being a blend between the Anglican and Lutheran churches for the last decades, Jason Zinko, bishop of the Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, said Grace-St. John’s has ties with Carman’s community at large.
However, with the outreach work outside the church, he said the impact of the fire is going to be felt outside the congregation as well.
“A lot of our churches, especially in smaller communities, are really important to the life that happens within the community,” Zinko said.
“I can imagine that they are feeling a sense of loss,” he said. “This is going to be a loss that many people feel.”
