Foreword for 2017 digital edition
by Daniel Bidulock
I first learned of All Saints from Pastor Bart Erickson of Saint Peter's Lutheran in Cochrane (a.k.a., the Little Green Church). He figured I needed to hone my preaching skills. All Saints, which is now attached to the Bethany Care Centre, presented the perfect opportunity. The bulk of the congregation has some form of dementia, so only God remembers the gibberish I spew when called to preach. And thank God for that! His mercy is far greater than that of your average parishioner.
Having been vetted by the centre's administration and Chaplain Trudy Gryschuk, I was handed a coil-bound history book. It had been compiled by All Saints' former congregation in 2007.
I'm not one to dwell on the past, but the story of the Cochrane area, its earliest residents, and their nifty little Anglican church in the foothills seized my imagination. A building tells a tale about the people who built it and the communities that form around it. The tale of All Saints is one of hilarious missteps, apparent apathy, and a community that could never quite get its act together. Even now, with only three weeks left in 2017, the opportunity to celebrate the 125th anniversary of this beautiful, historic church building is slipping away.
That said, it is miraculous that this building still stands at all. Even a hundred years ago it would have made more sense to tear it down or simply let it return to the earth. And yet, there it is, and here I am literally writing history. Praise Jesus.
My time serving at Bethany Cochrane has been a privilege and a blessing. Undoubtedly it is a place of deep sadness for many. For me, I can only describe it as strangely uplifting. Bethany, like the All Saints church itself, is a highly visible testimony to God's Spirit of mercy, compassion, love, and the resiliency he baked into us, his most treasured creation.
I hope you enjoy this digitized version of the original paper book. For future historians, I used my busted old Canon MX310 scanner to obtain the image of each page, and used tesseract to perform the optical code recognition. The entire manuscript, broken into 33 chapters, is formatted in markdown. In all likelihood, this book is riddled with spelling errors introduced by myself or the OCR processing, which is far from perfect. I think I allowed most of the errors made by the original contributors.
It has been my privilege to perform this small act of worship. I am blessed that I should be allowed to assist and worship alongside the residents of Bethany Cochrane in the historic All Saints Anglican Church.
May Christ's peace be upon you.
December 11, 2017