After fire, Bandon faithful celebrate their new chapel.

Byline: Winston Rosss The Register-Guard

BANDON - Shirl Stewart awoke with a start in the pre-dawn darkness.

His wife had the phone, and the phone brought bad news. It was 4 a.m. Stewart's church was burning down.

The branch president of the Bandon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hopped out of bed, threw his clothes on and rushed to the building. The chapel and cultural hall were fully engulfed.

A neighbor had spotted the flames when she got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water, and called Stewart. He watched firefighters battle the blaze on through the morning, then answered questions throughout the day.

"I just stood there and watched," Stewart said. "I was sad. It meant quite a loss."

Church members said they were told by Bandon police that the fire started when an arsonist broke a window at the church and threw a burning oil filter loaded with some kind of flammable liquid inside.

After the fire was extinguished, officials with the church's Salt Lake City headquarters declared the building a total loss. The congregation had nowhere to worship.

But that was three years ago, and things are different now. Stewart and his flock have a new brick church to call home, a gleaming $1.2 million facility that will earn his congregation a beautification award from the city of Bandon today.

But in the summer of 2004, this was a hard future to imagine.

Stewart and others had no idea who'd target the church, he said. "We've never had graffiti, phone calls, letters, anything to indicate anyone was ticked off at us," he said.

Investigators never caught the fire-starter, although they did interview a suspect eventually convicted in connection with a different fire who said he "could confess" to torching the Bandon church, said Pam Hansen, one of the church members.

Church officials from Salt Lake City assured Stewart and his congregation that the church would be rebuilt with funds from the international organization. But they didn't know when it would happen.

At first, the trouble was that the building Salt Lake officials wanted to put on the property appeared too big for the site at Ninth Street and Delaware Avenue.

Stewart's 175-member congregation required a 6,000-square-foot church, he said.

So the search began for property, which is hard to come by in booming Bandon and harder to afford, even for a large organization such as the Mormon church.

At one point, the focus was on a parcel that was to be subdivided, with part of the land to be used for the church.

But that deal fell through, Hansen said.

Meanwhile, Stewart and his fellow Mormons needed a place to worship. For two years, they attended a nearby church in Coquille. Then the Coquille church needed to be upgraded, which meant both congregations had to commute to meetings in North Bend. From Bandon, that meant a 90-minute round-trip drive.

"We did that for three years," Hansen said.

Finally, Stewart decided to try and move things along a little. He paced off the property that held the original church and decided it was big enough for the new building.

"I said, 'Hey, that building will fit here,` " Stewart said. "Then things started to gel."

The church leaders in Salt Lake City agreed the new facility would work fine at the old site. Construction was finished earlier this year on a church complete with fire sprinklers, a burglar alarm, oak pews, velvet benches, pianos in every room and a baptistry viewable via double doors into the cultural room.

Stewart and his congregation are glad the wait is over.

"We're just glad to have a place," Hansen said.