Jason Rioux provides update on progress made on restoration and future plans for St. John's Anglican Church in Chapleau

Jason Rioux, the owner of the St John's Anglican Church building, kindly provided me with a copy of a letter he sent to the congregation and Bishop Tom Corston about the present situation at the church. The letter provides details on steps that have already been taken to restore the church, and measures that are planned.

I extend my thanks to Jason for permitting me to share the letter with readers of the Chapleau Express in Chapleau Moments and here, as he moves forward. Jason is also open to hearing from you.  His email is jason.rioux@gmail.com

My email is mj.morris@live.ca

BY JASON RIOUX

Happy 2018! We wanted to share how things are going and provide an update for our vision on things yet to come. This building was built by you and taken care of by you for the last 100+ years.

Regardless of a change in building ownership, this remains YOUR church and we are deeply committed to keeping you in YOUR church. It’s not St. John’s Anglican Church without you.

Preserving the Building In 2016 and 2017, we undertook major renovations to improve the bones of the building. Without this investment, the building would have fallen into further disrepair.

Major basement renovations were completed to allow for fully accessible commercial food and retail use. This turned out to be an enormous job with many costly hurdles that were overcome. Exterior brick repairs and restoration work began.

We completed repairs to the northeast corner of the building near the chimney and started on the west wall’s spaulding brick. The brick chimney was rebuilt to full height and lined so it can be used again.

The rear cement patio and landscaping was added. We are lucky to have found Marc, our local experienced bricklayer to take on this work, and he had to find 100 year old reclaimed brick from southern Ontario and haul it north to Chapleau to do the job right.

And as it turns out, our bricklayer is now the tenant downstairs with homemade pizza making skills second to none!

As for 2018, we will finish the brick repairs on the west wall, point the brickwork around the building, and start brick repairs to the bell tower. We would like to bring back the original “castle top” -- if we can find a way to fund it.

Financial Sustainability

The church building remains a money losing project, big time. Our objective is to bring the building into financial sustainability for the for the long term. To accomplish this, the reality is we have 3 things to focus on:

1. Finding additional rent from the main floor

• We need this new rent to co-exist with the congregation, and will likely come from a new additional tenant or from running special events.

• We are currently looking for ideas, other non-profits focusing on local history and culture, performing arts, entertainment, special events, etc.

• Unfortunately this will require most of the pews to come out. More about pews discussed below.

2. Reducing our heating costs

• Step 1 – Install a new wood stove in the basement, just finished!

• Step 2 – Get completely off heating oil – We plan to install a new boiler heating system in 2018 that will use renewable wood pellets as the fuel. These are considered carbon neutral (good for the environment) and will be sourced from northern Ontario (good for the local economy).

 • Step 3 – Seal up the building – we need to seal up air cracks and gaps on the main floor. We will get a blower door test conducted to identify the air leaks and then try to seal them up to improve the efficiency of the building and reduce our heating costs for next winter.

3. Helping our current tenants be successful long term

• We are working closely with our current basement tenant, Stonewalls restaurant, to help them grow their business to meet the needs and desires of the Chapleau community. We are in the process of installing a new wood fired pizza oven downstairs for everyone’s eating pleasure in the next month or so, I’m super excited about that.

• We want to help the Anglican Church congregation find ways to innovate and connect with the community. We are open to trying new things, we have the large vacant lot next door that can host special events, we have the ability to be creative together for mutual benefit.

Please keep this in mind as you plan 2018.

We are here to help where we can, just pitch us your ideas on what you want to try.

Environmental Sustainability

We believe that we can make investments in the b that can both accomplish financial and environmental sustainability. For example the heating system improvements have the ability to make the building “carbon neutral”. Currently we are burning over 15,000 litres of heating oil per winter, this has significant CO2 emissions that are bad for our climate.

It just happens that converting to modern wood pellet heating is lower cost than oil, and is carbon neutral, a win-win situation. But it takes effort to make this switch.

We are working with technology suppliers from Europe, and we are working with Ontario pellet fuel suppliers for bulk deliveries to Chapleau. It’s not easy going first, but we think it is worth the effort.

What to do with the Pews? We expect that any new uses upstairs will require more flexibility in the space, different seating arrangements, more open space, ability to set up tables and We would like to hear ideas and preferences from the congregation on how we select which pews we should keep. We think we can probably keep 6 to 10 long pews in the space. Some questions and ideas we would like your feedback on:

1. Do we add name plaques to identify the original family pews that will remain in the church? This way we can keep track of the pews as they are shuffled around over time. Can you propose which pews we should keep as a priority?

2. We will be looking to sell 20 or more pews to help offset our building restoration costs. Should we first offer the pews for sale to the original families they may have sat in them? If so, how do we contact those families if no longer in attendance?

 3. Any ideas for local businesses or places that might need pews like this?

4. Do we know a local carpenter that can shorten pews so that they can fit better into people’s homes? This could help more of the pew find their way into homes in Chapleau.

 In terms of replacement seating that can accommodate multiple uses, we are thankful to receive 100 chairs from the United Church to help get us started! Opening up the space and getting more people into the church will help with our collective community outreach. It's a beautiful building and sharing it with the community is a positive thing that increases the long term viability of the church.

As always, I want to hear your thoughts. You can email me anytime at Jason.rioux@gmail.com