LEBANON — Dennis Merrihew started coming to First Baptist Church when he was around 11 years old. That’s the better part of a lifetime ago for the 74-year-old Lebanon resident.

Since then, his daughters were married in the old 1870 Gothic Revival structure and he served for many years as its caretaker. That building’s tall ceiling heard an untold number of prayers from Merrihew and his fellow congregants.

In December 2016, an arsonist burned down the 146-year-old church. While Merrihew still grieves a bit and has fond memories of the original church, he was pleased to be standing in the sanctuary of its new, and newly opened, replacement on Palm Sunday.

“I’m going to miss that old open feel to it,” Merrihew said. But the new building is “a well-laid-out church for our needs now.”

After eight years and a few months of fundraising and construction, stops and starts, First Baptist’s congregation finally was able to return to their consecrated space at the corner of School and Green streets, a block off Colburn Park, giving them a week to prepare for Good Friday and Easter. It has been a long road, but one they felt was laid out for them from above.

“Good morning! Welcome to First Baptist Church,” Carol Rataj, a member for the past 20 years or so, said at the start of the service in a packed sanctuary. “This is a good time to thank God.”

After Rataj’s welcome and invitation to “ladies’ Bible study” and an April 26 ladies’ lunch, Steve Girdwood, who led the church’s building committee, gave a brief account of the church’s status.

“You may see some technical difficulties today,” he said, referring to the church’s new sound and video gear. “If something kind of goes wonky on us, remember, we’re here to praise God.”

There’s plenty of work left to do on the building, he said, particularly in the basement, which will house a fellowship hall, a large kitchen and its longstanding Raven Box Food Pantry, which serves around 700 people a year.

The church had about $8,000 left in its construction budget at the end of March, Girdwood said. It received a quote from an electrician for work on the basement and elevator, for $8,000. Over the past several years of construction, which church members have done largely with their own hands, this has become a pattern.

“God gives us exactly what we need, when we need it,” he said.

While that’s true of the new building, it might be true of the fire that claimed the old one, strange as that might seem. For eight years, the congregation carried on its mission to serve the community, even without a permanent home. It might be stronger now that its congregation has had to “wander in the wilderness” as more than one church member put it on Sunday.

“We don’t need a building to do what God’s calling us to do,” Rev. Ryan Gabel, the church’s pastor, said in an interview.

A historic loss anda monumental task

Before the 1870 church burned down, it wasn’t exactly meeting the congregation’s needs. Sunday school classes took place in the basement fellowship hall, which was partitioned off into four makeshift classrooms. And the building needed upkeep.

The congregation has had its ups and downs over the years, Merrihew said, adding that the church nearly closed at one point, when it was between pastors and attendance dwindled.

But the congregation itself, which dates to 1860, is resilient. At the time of the fire, the church had a membership of about 125.

The fire, set late on the night of Dec. 28, 2016, could have been a death blow.

Less than a week later, in the early morning hours of Jan. 2, 2017, Lebanon Police arrested Anthony K. Boivert, 27, of Lebanon, after he stabbed two people at an apartment complex in the city.

Boivert pleaded guilty in July 2018 to arson, assault, witness tampering, burglary and attempted arson for a fire in another location that quickly went out. He was sentenced to serve 25 to 50 years in state prison.

While the resolution of the court case provided the church community with some closure, its long effort to build a new church was only beginning. Though the church quickly found an architect and general contractor to work with and obtained city permits in 2017, it early on ran into financial hurdles, Girdwood said in an interview.

The razed church was insured for just under $2.4 million, and an estimator hired by the construction firm pegged the rebuilding cost at $2.6 million. The $200,000 gap seemed manageable, and the church decided to proceed.

But when the project went out to bid, the cost ballooned to $3.9 million, which the church and contractor winnowed down to around $3.6 million, Girdwood said.

Even with the substantial shortfall, the church voted to move forward, with the idea that the project would happen in stages, starting with occupancy of the first floor lobby and sanctuary.

The church also opted to finance about $600,000 of the cost, Girdwood said.

At first, church members worked with people who specialized in designing and building churches, including architect Jack Althouse, of Pennsylvania, and an Iowa-based construction firm.

But by the time the project broke ground, in October 2018, the church had ended those relationships, turning instead to Upper Valley native Jay Barrett, an architect familiar with local permitting.

By early 2020, with the project over budget and the church owing about $80,000 to contractors, the congregation opted to take on the work of coordinating the project themselves, Girdwood said.

“We didn’t feel like we were getting accurate financial information from the contractor,” Girdwood said.

Owing money bothered church officials.

“Our whole plan was to pay as you go,” Girdwood said.

Coordinating subcontractors, or even finding them, is hard enough for professionals. Church leaders struggled mightily.

“Once the general contractor left, there was a period of time when we were floundering,” said Girdwood, a lawyer. He and his wife have been church members since 1990.

The biggest issue has been securing contractors for the jobs that need someone licensed: elevator installation, HVAC, plumbing and electrical.

Two longtime church members, both of whom have leadership roles in the church, stabilized things, Girdwood said.

Gabel, the church’s pastor for the past year and associate pastor for four years before that, said that the two men were so averse to attention that he declined to name them. But their identities are not particularly secret.

Keith Davio, who was chairman of the church board at the time of the fire and is currently its clerk, and Bob Souza, who is chairman of the church’s Shepherds Board, oversaw construction and were on site at the church three or four days a week, “putting in full days,” for at least the past two years, Girdwood said.

The two men have a lot of experience in building and other technical fields, he added, calling them “fix-it-all, do-it-all handymen” who could coordinate with contractors.

“It’s been a godsend for us to have their availability to help finish off the project,” he said.

Church members have helped with all manner of tasks, including hanging drywall, installing doors and flooring, putting up trim, and lots and lots of painting.

“I’ve got a lot of blood, sweat and tears in this building,” Michael Barragan, 52, of Sharon, said on Sunday.

A native of Las Vegas who moved to the Upper Valley in 2006, Barragan works as a contractor and has been putting in late afternoon-early evening hours at the church.

“My tools are still downstairs,” in the basement, he said. He found the church when he visited its food pantry in a time of need, soon after moving to the area.

He likes the new church.

“It’s more modern, up-to-date, cleaner,” Barragan said. “But I miss the old building. ... I like the older buildings and beams and wood, the older look of buildings around here.”

It’s a change from Las Vegas.

“I came here to start a new life and get off the drugs I was on,” Barragan said. He’s been sober ever since and the church has played a role in that.

“To be in this building, it’s home,” he said. “We’re finally out of the wilderness and we’re home.”

A renewed call to service

Work from Barragan and many others has enabled the church to nearly complete the project at a cost so far of around $3.5 million, Girdwood said.

The church has raised around $500,000 in donations, and has $45,000 in grants from the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation and the Mascoma Bank Foundation to complete the basement kitchen. The money is meant to support the food pantry, which stayed open after the fire, and the church’s community dinners, which members are eager to resume.

“We had some contractors and venders who helped us,” Girdwood said.

Fjeld Drywall, of Rutland, furnished free labor and materials at cost, and Britton Lumber, in Fairlee, furnished materials at cost. Slate for the roof was donated, but it cost a lot to install.

Donated labor was still the biggest cost savings, he said.

What the congregation, and the community have gotten for their money and time is an open, airy lobby and sanctuary, and offices on the ground floor, and upstairs a suite of classrooms for Sunday school and other programs. Though it was built in the same size footprint as the old church, the new church is larger in terms of usable space.

On Sunday, church members set up additional chairs just before the service to accommodate everyone. Seating wasn’t at full capacity because of a display for Palm Sunday, Girdwood said. Between the main floor and the nearly completed balcony, the sanctuary can fit almost 200, and the lobby can accommodate an overflow.

The service was a joyous one, with a band that included Girdwood on bass and Gabel on guitar leading the assembly in hymns and songs.

Marissa Washer, 28, danced to the chorus of “Days of Elijah” with her son Malichi MacIntyre, 10, and daughter Lenore MacIntyre, 8, while her fiance, Devin MacIntyre, 36, sang along.

Washer, of Canaan, wasn’t the only person who called being in the new church “surreal.”

“Now that I’m here, I’m grateful that it’s back,” she said after the service.

Gabel’s sermon focused on written evidence, beyond the Bible, for the existence of Jesus.

“God is the moral lawgiver, and we, all of us, have broken his moral law over and over and over again,” Gable said, near his conclusion. And later, “We were created by God intimately, for a purpose.”

During the eight years and a few months between the fire and Palm Sunday, the church met in the Lebanon Masonic Hall, Lebanon Middle School, the Upper Valley Senior Center, the former Hartford Elks Lodge, then back to the Masonic Hall. Every service entailed a laborious process of setting up in advance and tearing down afterward, and the church also paid some rent, a cost that will go away.

What the new building represents is a sense of stability, Gabel said, but the church did pretty well without it. He and others referred to the building as a tool for the congregation to use to fulfill its mission.

“It’s nice to have a home,” Gabel said. “But my focus, and I think our focus as a church, is not this building. It’s serving the community.”

For a long time, people thought of church as a place where people displayed their rectitude and moral fitness. But that’s backward, Gabel said. Church is where you go when you’re at your worst.

That was true of Anthony Boisvert, the troubled man who set the fire that claimed the old church.

“We actually got a letter from him from prison,” Gabel said. That led to an exchange of letters and an invitation to the church once his sentence is served.

“It seems like he’s doing well and getting the help he needs while he’s in prison,” Gabel said. He’s involved in Bible study and going to church on Sundays.

“Praise God that he’s changed.”

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.