Firefighters battle a blaze that destroyed New Salem Presbyterian Church on a Friday morning in late January. No one was injured but the building is a complete loss.
“The church is on fire.”
It’s words you never want to hear. For Jeff Marquis, the commissioned pastor at New Salem Presbyterian Church in Midland, Beaver County, the call he received on that Friday morning of Jan. 24 is one he’ll never forget.
“My first thought was, I was hoping a dehumidifier or something was malfunctioning,” Jeff recalled. “I really thought minor. As I was driving to the church – you can see it off in the distance – and I said, ‘Oh, no.’ There was a lot of smoke. It wasn’t a calculator smoldering. It was something big.”
A neighbor spotted some smoke around 9:30 a.m., alerted the local fire department and contacted the New Salem Church secretary, who was still making her way to the building. Before long, the structure, which was built in 1850, was up in flames. It’s considered a total loss. While no cause has been determined, arson has been ruled out and it’s speculated that the fire started in an electrical panel in the basement.
“I knew that the church was going to be uninhabitable pretty quick,” Jeff said, “and so I went into think-ahead mode. The first thing that we thought of was, ‘We lost the building, but we didn’t lose the church. The church isn’t the building.’ That’s the direction we took things. Nobody was hurt, no firemen were hurt. We had a lot to be thankful for.
“God makes all things new again.”
Where New Salem Church goes next is still to be determined, but the plan is to construct a building on that same lot in the future.
“We think we’re going to probably rebuild if at all possible,” said Jeff, who has been leading New Salem Church for the last 24 years.
A fund through the Presbyterian Foundation has been established so friends and neighbors of the congregation can donate money toward the rebuilding efforts. How long it will take to rebuild is unknown.
“We’re doing what the Lord told us to do and take one day at a time,” Jeff said.
That’s not easy to do when you have a congregation in need of things like a worship space, materials and other gathering areas that need figured out in advance. The local fire hall opened its doors to the New Salem congregation on the two Sundays after the fire. Since then, the services and other church activities have been held in the nearby elementary school’s classrooms and cafeteria. A more permanent location within four miles of the existing property for the congregation to gather is a Reformed Presbyterian Church that recently closed, and talks are ongoing about New Salem meeting there down the road.
“The community around us, the body of Christ around us, has made it very easy for us,” Jeff said when asked about the immediate needs of the church. “The reason I wanted to go to the fire hall instead of one of the churches is because I wanted to have a humble beginning.
“Those firemen didn’t give me that,” he continued with a chuckle. “They really reached out and gave us a meeting place. They had it set up for us, and it was beautiful. I was expecting to walk into a bingo hall, and it was far from that.”
The fire department has also stepped up to help with the church’s annual Wild Game Dinner. As the name suggests, the meal includes wild game harvested by local hunters and fishermen, and it’s a fundraiser for the church. This year’s event is scheduled for early March.
A charred sanctuary is what remains following a fire that destroyed the church that was built in 1850.
“I’m kinda ‘non-fundraiser,’” Jeff said. “We were always looking to draw people to the church. It just wasn’t that anymore. The fire hall has opened that up and the community is flying into this thing. I would have never had it (after the fire), but somebody said maybe this is the time we need to do this. The community is rallying, and it’s not just one or two people putting this thing on now. It’s turned into this pretty nice project, which is including a lot of people outside of our congregation.
“Our hope is, with this attention, we’ll grow the church spiritually outside the church building.”
On an average Sunday morning, New Salem Church averages between 40-50 people in attendance. Since the fire, some “old faces that had fallen away have resurfaced,” Jeff said. It has created a community of support for a congregation that is putting the pieces back together.
“It has been a time of mourning,” Jeff said. “It’s a loss of the space, which connects with the loss of memories.”
On the Sunday two days after the fire, Jeff found a unique way of sharing his thoughts to the New Salem Church congregation in a message that undoubtedly rang true with those in attendance.
“It was about the body of Christ,” he recalled. “It was the Hokey Pokey. There’s lots of hands and lots of parts in that dance. That leads into the body of Christ. He’s the head. The Hokey Pokey, if you listen to the words real close, we put our hands, our feet, our ears and whatever parts you wanna pick into the mix.
“The thrust of the message was what’s said secondly in the song: we’ve gotta turn ourselves around. It was a message on repentance.”
Shortly after the fire, Jeff recalled meeting four nearby pastors who offered their support. They were clergy who he had not previously been acquainted. It was an eye-opening moment for Jeff.
“I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me,” Jeff said. “Shame on me. That’s the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God and love your neighbor. Well, I didn’t know my neighbor. That’s part of the turn-yourself-around plan.
“I preach it all the time that God’s plan is not within these four walls but far outside. This is just a place for us to meet, to have ministry and to grow families in the things of the Spirit and through the Word. We said that all the time, but the fact of the matter is I don’t know if we did that or not. We have ministries, we have missions, but we weren’t really connected. I don’t know why churches get so possessive of their building that they lose sight of the bigger plan.”
An added casualty to the fire is that the congregation had plans to expand the building.
“We brought the building into the 21st century and it was pretty much all updated,” Jeff explained. “We were looking to add on. We got to that point where we can move forward. It’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears.”
The plan is to rebuild New Salem Presbyterian Church after a January fire destroyed the building.
Jeff’s roots to the New Salem Church run deep. When he was hired in December of 2000, he found a sign that listed the congregation’s early pastors from the 1790s. One of them, unbeknownst to him, was his great-grandfather, Thomas Marquis.
“It just kind of blew me away,” Jeff said of the coincidence. “For 24 years, I’ve been asking God why did you bring me here? Why here, why now? I examine myself and ask that question a lot. At one point I had thought he had put me here because my grandfather would have been part of the opening and there’s been times where I thought well maybe I’m the one that’s supposed to close it.
“Somebody called me up on the phone after the fire and said God has put you there for this particular time. That was the first time in a long time that that was the closest thing to getting an answer for me.”
As the New Salem congregation looks to the future, the goal is to return to some sense of “normal,” whatever that looks like.
“We’ve worked to set up an emergency encampment called the church,” Jeff explained. “We’re trying to get things back to normal without being normal. We’re gonna settle in, and then we’re going straight into the ministries that we were doing so that we don’t lose that. We have a kids’ club with the school district. If we only do half of it, we only do half of it. I just want to make sure that we’re doing what we need to do and turn ourselves around.”
The immediate chaos has settled down for this congregation in western Pennsylvania now that things are in place following the devastating fire. Sure, there are still many items that need to be crossed off before complete order can be restored, but thanks to a faithful congregation and a supportive community that surrounds it, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
“I’ve been very at peace with everything,” Jeff said. “I know the Lord’s guiding us because everything has just fallen so easily into place. Things have quieted down all of a sudden.
“We have started to look at things so much differently since this fire. What do you need for a church? You need space and you need God. We’re seeing things differently.”
It’s speculated that the fire on Jan. 24 at New Salem Church started in an electrical panel in the basement.