Sixty years—that’s how long Stephen Jackson, an architect by profession, has been worshiping at St. Luke’s Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was also there that he met his wife in 1987.
In the early hours of Saturday, February 17, 2024, the parish caught fire, destroying the library and the nave where parishioners gathered for worship.
“It was pretty devastating,” Jackson told The Living Church about when he learned what had happened hours after the event. Bishop Shannon Rogers Duckworth, Louisiana’s 12th bishop and the first woman in the office, immediately went to the parish with her husband at 3 a.m. that day. St. Luke’s rector, the Rev. Bryan Owen, lived nearby and could smell the smoke as he walked toward the church around the same time.
The next day, Owen led a service in a gymnasium using a cross recovered from the fire, with Duckworth joining parishioners. An 11-person committee led by Jackson was formed to oversee the reconstruction and selected an architectural firm experienced in designing houses of worship.
On All Saints’ Day this year, November 2, they broke ground on a new church building.
“Today we mark a beginning of a new chapter in the life of St. Luke’s. Here we stand ready to build again, trusting in a God who makes all things new,” Owen said to the nearly 300 people who witnessed the groundbreaking.
One church building lost in the fire was originally designed as a parish hall. Owen said that the congregation at the time was unable to build a church from the ground up for reasons that were never clear. Jackson alluded to a common situation other parishes experienced—when they couldn’t afford a dedicated sanctuary, they used a fellowship hall instead. Although it’s unclear if that was the case for St. Luke’s, the fire and the rebuilding that followed have led them to fulfill an original dream.
In the coming months, Owen said, St. Luke’s is “building from the ground up a church building with a façade that looks like a church,” emphasizing that no drastic or unnecessary changes will be made.
“When you go inside, it’s gonna be very familiar to anybody who knows and loves St. Luke’s,” Owen said. “It’s gonna feel like home.”
Jackson confirmed the idea. The new structure will have a green marble wall emulating what was in the previous building, but set inside a large Gothic arch-shaped recess. The overall look will feel familiar to anyone who has been at St. Luke’s—the depiction of Christus Rex, the style of the stained glass, and even the colors of the ceiling.
One key improvement, Jackson said, is that the new structure will have a “very strong, powerful … Anglican feel” that wasn’t present before. The old building did not have a Gothic arch or high ceilings, features common in Anglican parishes and cathedrals. The ceiling’s height will be “immensely more” compared to the old structure and will have a “much more spiritual feeling.”
Owen, who is entering his 13th year as rector, admits he has never gone through a rebuilding effort like this with a congregation before.
“It’s really been extraordinary to see how things do fall into place at the right time and the right way,” he said. He credits Jackson and the remarkable people at St. Luke’s “who are just willing to do what we need to do to move forward.”
Duckworth, who knew Owen two decades ago when both served in neighboring Mississippi, said the rector’s leadership and the lay leaders, including the committee Jackson led, “have been so faithful in the entire process.”
“It’s just such a testament to the strength of that congregation, to the strength of the leadership, and to our faith that even in the midst of hardship, God’s strength and Spirit will be with us,” Duckworth said. “And that’s part of the rebuilding process.”
The diocese has helped raise funds, and Duckworth and her canon to the ordinary made themselves available for meetings with the vestry and the building committee. Duckworth also commissioned an eight-minute film to tell St. Luke’s story.
The Baton Rouge Fire Department ruled out arson as the cause of the fire last year, but no specific cause was identified.
Duckworth said that rebuilding St. Luke’s carries great significance because of the multigenerational connections parishioners have to the church. One of her predecessors, the Rt. Rev. Charles Edwards Jenkins III, who died in 2021, was a former rector of the parish.
Jenkins celebrated the wedding of Jackson and his wife—whom Jackson met on Christmas Eve of 1987.
Asked when the new building would be open and operational, Jackson said, “We are planning Christmas Eve services of ’26.”
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
