On the Banks of the Salmon Falls
It’s in rough shape today.
But in the summer of 1780, in the small village of Acton, Maine a revival broke out under the ministry of an itinerant pastor by the name of Tozier Lord. Fifty people came to faith, and a brand new congregation was born.
In the years that followed, the region suffered under widespread sickness, seasons of extreme cold and crop failure, as well as in-roads by theologically spurious spiritual movements. In 1801, eight remaining members re-organized under the leadership of one Gershom Lord, the brother of its founding minister. Over the next three years, their number grew by forty souls.
In 1815 Elder David Blaisdell was called as Pastor. Though often sick and absent from the pulpit, the church recorded that he was yet “instrumental in being used by God to cause a revival to take place”. Sixty-nine people were baptized in a single year. Blaisdell and his brother held meetings in school houses throughout the region, and another small church community was established in nearby Lebanon, Maine in 1817. On April 1, 1818 a meeting house was erected in Acton.
Elder David Lord was born on August 9, 1814. In 1832, he was called by Christ and began to preach. He studied at Parsonsfield Seminary and was ordained on September 28, 1836. He served this congregation as pastor in 1838, and again from 1842-1843. Over the course of his ministry, serving amidst those latter years of the Second Great Awakening, he is recorded to have baptized more than five hundred people. In 1873 the congregation paid one hundred dollars for timbers and the use of a team of horses, and moved their meeting house from its original location, down the hill to a piece of land on the banks of the Salmon Falls River. The sanctuary was raised up and placed atop a new ground floor, and a steeple was added to the structure. And there it has stood ever since; an iconic New England white clapboard silhouette against a backdrop of pastureland, on the banks of the river, on the edge of a once-bustling mill town. This place of worship has witnessed revivals and declines, countless weddings and funerals, heard thousands of prayers and hymns and sermons, hosted summer missions and fellowship meals. The congregation that built and filled this sanctuary celebrated their two hundredth anniversary in 1980, a year before I was even born.
And today, the last, aging member of a once thriving community of faith sits across a table from me to ask if I - and the little church that I serve - would take a ring of keys from them. Against grey clouds, black crows fly in and out of a towering, ruptured steeple, damaged by lightning some previous year and left un-repaired. Weathered clapboards buckle, and paint chips away. The unheated sanctuary stands full of memory, yet devoid of worshippers. I stand alone amidst the empty pews, shoulders hunched against the cold. Reaching for a musty hymnal, I offer a song of praise, leaving it to echo between the walls.
And I wonder: Can these (even these) dry bones live?… “O Lord, you know!”
“…I have heard of your fame;
I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord.
Repeat them in our day…”
Come, Holy Spirit.
Rev. Chris Bannon
Area Coordinator North, Revive New England