You don't know what you've got till it's gone

When the community abandons the church, the church may abandon the community--literally. And so a church is being shipped from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, but not everyone is happy about it:

Even worse, they were shocked at the scale of local backlash when news of the sale leaked out.

"We've taken a fair amount of abuse around this issue," said Canon Vaughan.

Although heritage advocates say that they want to keep open respectful lines of dialogue they do not accept that the criticism was unfounded.

“The church was not about to fall down, it's fantastically sound,” said Peter Coffman, a fellow in the history department at Dalhousie University and vice-president for the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada. “The amount of time it took to take it apart shows that.”

And he said that Canon Vaughan's initial assertion that the building would replace one destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, an error the cleric later blamed on miscommunication with the contractor, hurt the parish's credibility.

“The misinformation … certainly seemed to me an attempt to sugar-coat the whole transaction,” Mr. Coffman said. “The church does not give the appearance of dealing in good faith.” [emphasis added for the hell of it --ed.]

This reminded me of a video that I first saw some time ago at David Thompson's fine blog. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure. It induces odd feelings, at least in me.