“I was intentional with the signs on the property,” Jolly said. “Nowhere will you see the word closed.”
“I want people to know that we’ve not missed a beat. We’re continuing to worship,” Jolly said. “We’re going to go back to our three-service schedule in the fall, just like normal. There’s not one thing that we have missed doing. We still operate the soup kitchen every week.”
The repair will be covered by insurance, Jolly said.
“The Episcopal Church has a captive insurance carrier, Church Insurance Group. They only serve Episcopal churches, and they’re not for-profit entities making money for their shareholders. They’re going to cover 100% of the repair,” Jolly said.
“Even though there is evidence of long-term wear and tear, we have in our policy a caption about correlating causality, or two events coming together to cause something terrible to happen,” he said.
“You had the initial wear and tear, rot, decay, what have you, over 100 plus years, but then you had the precipitating seismic event of the hurricane,” Jolly said.
“The direction of the winds was north and west, because we had about 11 trees down on the campus during Hurricane Helene, all of them were laying that way, and we had photographic and video evidence showing steeple before and after,” he said.
“Even with insurance paying the full bill, thanks be to God, it’s going to be a lot of work for us in terms of coordinating logistics,” Jolly said. “And there are some related costs that they’re not going to be able to pay for which we gladly will pay for.”
The church is in the final stages of collecting a third bid for the work and assessing the proposed approaches with the insurance company.
“We are anxious to get started,” Jolly said.
Preparations include removing chandeliers, protecting the cornerstone and artwork at the back of the nave, storing the “Stations of the Cross” paintings by local artist Barbara “Bobby” Cheetham and disassembling and storing the pipe organ’s antiphonal division, which was mounted on the balcony above the entryway to the nave.
