I have been taken with rural wooden churches since I was a freshman at St. Olaf College. Before I realized that God really didn’t care if I continued to go to the Episcopal Church or if I went to Boe Chapel on campus (which had a better preacher) I hiked the two miles every Sunday to All Saints Episcopal in town. It is a wooden carpenter Gothic church with a lot of little artistic flourishes. The town of Dundas, three miles from Northfield, had a bar that wasn’t as rigorous in asking for identification as the Northfield Muni. One day while hiking there I noticed Holy Cross Episcopal church. It had a family resemblance to All Saints but also had some distinct differences, like an offset steeple and more stone mixed in with the carpenter gothic flourishes. But like All Saints it had a steep pitched roof good for shedding Minnesota snowfalls. I learned that these were Bishop Whipple churches. Whipple was the Bishop for rural Minnesota. He planted these little gems of churches all over the prairies and I set out to see as many as I could.
We went to Norway on our honeymoon and I ran into Norwegian Stave Churches, wooden churches built by shipwrights. Their roofs are built like inverted boat hulls. Looking at the carvings I could see the inspiration that Professor Flaten felt when he carved the wooden beams in the art barn that bore his name and the beams of the radio station’s large performance studio A. You can see my earlier blog post including stave church pictures here.

Later we served USAID projects in Slovakia and I found wooden churches spotted around the countryside close to the Ukraine and Polish borders. ome of these churches had served four denominations depending on the ruler. They had been evangelical (Lutheran), Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Uniate, churches using Orthodox liturgy but owing allegiance to the Roman Pope. This was a compromise when the Poles or Hapbsburgs took the country over from the Ukrainians. They are a mix of carpenter Gothic and Carpenter Byzantine. You can see my earlier bog post here.

In my research on rural wooden churches, I came across the Jesuit wooden missionary churches of Chiloé and surrounding islands in Chile dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The church tour was one of the first ones I booked when we booked this cruise. It was canceled for lack of interest so I rebooked another one (HAL offered three.) The Churches are designated as UNESCO world heritage sites. We visited three and drove by more.

The first one we visited, St Mary of Loretto in Acheo, was, according to our guide, the most significant because of its artwork and decoration. It is also the oldest. It, like the stave churches of Norway, was built by shipwrights and it’s roof is an inverted boat hull. It is on the island of Quinchao, a short ferry ride from Chiloé.

The second church is in the town of Delcahue, the ferry terminal town on Chiloé and an artist’s colony. This church, Our Lady of Sorrows, is less decorated than St. Mary’s but is interesting because the wooden pillars are painted to look like marble, mimicking the Italian Churches. It has, what the church architects call a telescoping steeple. It was decorated for a wedding that would take place in just a few hours.

The final wooden church on our tour was St. Francis Cathedral in Castro, Chiloé’s main town. It is different from the others because instead of being built like an inverted boat, it is built in wooden gothic style. The outside is covered with yellow zinc plates but inside the natural wood is allowed to shine.

Along the way our guide pointed out a church that had been outgrown by its town. It was given to another town 8 kilometers away and in 2000 they put it on skids and using yellow treaded tractors moved it to its new location. They had to remove the rails of a bridge across a stream to make it the final several hundred meters. The guide showed us a video of the move. We drove past the church in the rain.