First published in News by Matt Oliver, Reporter covering North Oxford, Jericho and Summertown. Call me on 01865 425498

FINISHING touches are being made to a twostorey church extension that will create a busy community hub for parishioners.

Congregation members at St Andrews Church, in Linton Road, Oxford, raised more than 2m for the scheme, called the Jubilee Project.

It has been designed by Grove Street architecture firm MEB Design and will add a new hall, meeting spaces, youth rooms, creche, kitchen, caf area and offices.

The church gained planning permission in May 2012 and construction began in January 2014.

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Committee members hope it will be ready for use by the end of this month.

Committee treasurer Andrew Downs said: The new building will enable us to do lots of things better than we previously could.

In particular, we want to open up to the wider community and encourage outside groups to use the facilities more. We are also excited about being able to do more for young people.

There is often an image of churches as stuffy places with ageing populations, but here we are trying to involve young people and include them in the leadership.

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New church wing built to serve a wider community

Wooden arrows with names of cities and their respective distances point north outside the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Church (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)

Russian priests here rotate in for yearlong stints, primarily to celebrate Mass for the workers on the Russian base, who number between 15 and 30 at a time. The priests also welcome any of the islands other inhabitants, about 100 in winter when temperatures can plunge to -13 Fahrenheit (-25 Celsius), and 500 in the still-chilly summer months.

The greyish clapboard church was first built in Russia from Siberian cedar planks treated to withstand the frosts and harsh wind. It was then disassembled and shipped log-by-log, like Lego blocks, to Antarctica, said Alejo Contreras, a Chilean Antarctic explorer who witnessed the construction and consecration in 2004. To protect it from strong winds, it is bound to the nearby rocky mountain with chains.

In the summer, tourists and the staff of the international stations brave strong winds to hike up here, leaving snowy, muddy boots at the entrance. Some pray in silence, standing or kneeling because there are no pews in the boxy interior, while others marvel at the gold-leaf iconostasis screen of icons painted with bearded saints and winged angels in vivid colors.

During Sunday service, Kirilov reads from the scriptures in Russian and sings in an angelic voice.

The inside of the holy Trinity church (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)

A Russian polar worker, as any other believer, wants spiritual support nearby, a church devoted to God, said Kirilov, who has a flowing salt-and-pepper beard and blue eyes tinted with gray.

Reaching the churchs pointed belfry requires climbing up a staircase and squeezing in through an attic-like, square hole. At most, three people, rubbing shoulders, can fit next to the heavy bells that pierce the snowy silence with a cacophonous and hypnotic sound similar to the clang of a railroad crossing.

At night the church is lit from below and becomes a beacon for ships crossing the South Sea.

Thank God for this gift to us, Kirilov said, adding that he wishes more than a handful of people would attend Sunday service.

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The church at the South Pole

Published: Friday, March 6, 2015 at 1:32 p.m. Last Modified: Friday, March 6, 2015 at 1:32 p.m.

Beginning on Feb. 28, Grace Lutheran Church of Houma offers Lutheran worship services at 5 p.m. on Saturdays in the sanctuary of St. John's Episcopal Church in Thibodaux.

"Grace Lutheran Church has long desired to do some type of outreach in Thibodaux," said the Rev. Richard D. Rudnik, who has been with the church for more than seven years. "Our hope is that this will ultimately grow into a separate Lutheran church."

With an exception to Grace Lutheran in Houma, the nearest Lutheran churches to the Houma-Thibodaux area are located in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

Because of the small number of Lutheran churches in the area, many of Grace Lutheran's 250 members commute long distances to attend worship services.

While benefitting Lutherans in north Lafourche, the Thibodaux services also will offer a more convenient location for the churches members who travel from as far as Morgan City and Patterson.

Jeannie Thalheim, of Thibodaux, and her family have been members of Grace Lutheran Church for nearly three decades.

"We want to support the outreach effort here (in Thibodaux) as long as it takes to make that happen," she said. "Right now, we're in the early stages of development. This is something we've prayed about for a long time."

Prior to Rudnik's arrival at Grace Lutheran, the church had attempted a similar outreach effort in Thibodaux in 2005, but their work was interrupted by Hurricane Katrina.

"When Katrina hit, everything went topsy-turvy," Rudnik said. "They shifted gears and focused on hurricane relief, and later, the effort just fell apart. It barely got off the ground before Katrina, and it was a game changer."

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Lutheran Church begins outreach in Thibodaux

When Moushegh Tashjian was growing up, his father never spoke to him much about his experience surviving the Armenian genocide. But he and his siblings heard harrowing stories about it from their grandmother.

Actually, she wasn't their real grandmother something Tashjian only realized as he grew older. His father's mother had perished in the Turkish government's campaign, which began during World War I and, by typical estimates, left 1.5 million dead. After Tashjian's grandmother died, his grandfather married a woman who had lost two husbands and three children in the forced marches across the desert.

Hearing her accounts as a child, Tashjian now the pastor of St. Mary Armenian Apostolic Church in Costa Mesa felt hatred toward those who had victimized his family and others.

Only in later years, he said, did he let that attitude slip.

"As a young child, as a young boy, I would picture a Turk with the Ottoman-style clothing, with fez, with, what do you call it," he said, drawing the shape of a robe with his hands as he sat in the community room of St. Mary last week. "And with a sword. And I would see pictures of Turks slaughtering Armenians. They were everywhere.

"And, of course, yeah we wanted justice. And we still do."

Justice, at least in the form of official recognition of the genocide, has proved elusive over the years. The Turkish government has repeatedly denied that the atrocities of a century ago constituted a literal genocide even though the word is commonly used to describe them. Even U.S. leaders have gone back and forth over use of the word.

But in the meantime, Tashjian and his church are overseeing a recognition of their own. On March 8, the Eastside church will dedicate the Genocide Centennial Monument, a sculpture that features a pair of white marble pillars connected by a cross, set on a black granite base where a small fountain, flame and garden will eventually reside.

With the massacre of Armenians nearing its 100th anniversary, the church formed a remembrance committee and called for artists to submit designs. Nearly a dozen entries came in, and Harout Joulhaian, a Burbank resident who sometimes attends St. Mary services, got the nod.

Joulhaian, who grew up in Syria and moved to the United States 10 years ago, was partly inspired by his grandparents, who survived the genocide. In crafting his design, he aimed for a mixture of somberness and hope.

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Church to remember Armenian massacre as 100th anniversary nears

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