A 200-year old Anglican church in rural Nova Scotia, its congregation aged or moved away, is put up for sale. “It’s painful,” says the rector, “but we have to let it go.” It is a strangely potent story, both elegiac and uplifting. A story about the invisible essences that can attach themselves to place.

The buyers are an energetic group of Louisiana Baptists who want to move the old wooden building, lock, stock and sacristy, to become the Sanctuary for their new church in Abita Springs, an hour from New Orleans.

“Good luck to you next folks,” says an old man watching as the rafters fall. “I hope you keep the termites out.” Heritage timber frame specialists go to work to do just that.

Not least of the ironies is that the ancestors of these parishioners were the British settlers who in 1755, laying claim to the rich farm land of the Annapolis Valley, expelled its Acadian/Cajun inhabitants to ... Louisiana.

Further twists abound today. With North America’s Anglican and Episcopal Churches in disarray over same-sex marriages and payment for historic wrongs, energy and charisma — along with financial clout — have shifted south. Now it’s the more conservative, evangelical denominations that hum with confidence and drive.

Expanding on the demo you see here, the next chapter of the documentary will follow the restored timbers down the road to Abita Springs, present some of these fascinating contrasts and contradictions, and meet colourful characters at both ends. With high-spirited Cajun and Gospel music as antiphon to that beautiful, sad, very Anglican gloom. “Elegy?” “Resurrection?” Both?