Centreville Baptist Church
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Historical Information
In the summer of 1853, ten years after the organisation of Centreville Baptist Church, the first meeting house was erected and dedicated in August. An addition to the church was built and dedicated on December 23, 1871. On February 14, 1905, a business meeting was called to make plans for a new church building.
The new church was completed in 1906 and cost $6000 to build, not including four memorial windows worth between $700-$800, which were donated. The building contains a vestry, a large room over the vestry, a tower room (used as a classroom), and a pastor’s room beside the main audience room and choir above. The main audience room seats two hundred and fifty adults and can be enlarged to hold three hundred and fifty people by opening up the vestry’s Akron-style rolling partitions.
The building was finished with steel throughout and was originally heated with steam. An eight-foot basement lies beneath the whole church and contains a steam furnace and piping, cistern and dressing room. The baptistry, which lies to the right of the pulpit platform, is decorated with an oil painting of an eastern scene from the Valley of Jordan by E.P. Cliff of Fredericton. Dedication of the new church building took place on January 14, 1906 and is still used by Centreville Baptist Church today.
On January 14, 1969, the Christian Education Centre was dedicated. The addition to the original building contains eight classrooms, a nursery, ladies’ parlour, kitchen, pastor’s study and fellowship hall, which was also designed for sports activities.
Currently, the sanctuary is used for church services and the rest of the building is used by Centreville Day Care.