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GREENSBORO — Norman Smith sat in his kitchen with a pot of coffee, the sun hours from rising. At the other end of the telephone line, a Sotheby’s representative in London waited at the auction house for bidding to begin on “Adoration of the Magi.”

The lawyer was about to make what he considered the buy of a lifetime. The 1638 oil-on-canvas copy of 17th-century painter Peter Paul Rubens’ original, by one of his students, recently had become available from a private collection.

“Every time someone else would raise it, so would I,” Smith said of the bidding in July that eventually reached 10,000 pounds, or just under $20,000. “It’s a gripping, gripping piece.”

Smith, who had not given himself a price ceiling, had envisioned the artwork as a crowning piece of the restoration of the original chapel of Ebenezer Lutheran, a church he had been drawn to on South Tremont Drive.

Indeed, the change in the church in many ways paralleled Smith’s own transformation, from a deist and unitarian most of his adult life to a man of faith.

“I just had that feeling come inside me, somehow,” said Smith, 68.

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The project at Ebenezer got its start after a water line ruptured in 2002 in what had been the pulpit area of the original sanctuary, where bathrooms had been installed.

“I was on my hands and knees cutting out wet carpet,” said church member and head of building maintenance Skip Nilson, as others walked past. “They said, 'What a tragedy.’ My response was, 'Oh, what an opportunity.’”
 

Built in 1929 for a congregation formed 22 years earlier, the chapel was used only sporadically by this time for meetings or dressed up for an occasional wedding. Much of its original beauty had ended up under the wood and Plexiglas of other utilitarian uses of the space after the church added a larger sanctuary in 1959.

The congregation acknowledged in setting aside just $30,000 that there would be little money left after cleaning the space.
“It was a mess,” said Pastor Dan Koenig.

But it would become “mission possible” for Nilson, a retired federal employee who had his own restoration business and volunteered his talents for the job. Nilson envisioned “what could be” when everything other than the stained glass windows was stripped from the space.

The original coal furnace had left on the beams a decades-old substance similar to the green that forms on copper and brass over time. Removing a ceiling of wood fiber would be messy and time-consuming work.

“You’d put on a face mask and start cutting and then you’d come down for a cup of coffee and have to put on another face mask,” said the 78-year-old Nilson.

Refurbishing the rafters would take gallons of hand-mixed red mahogany stain, which the dry, stripped wood soaked up like a sponge.

Some of the stained glass windows — hidden behind the walls of an earlier renovation and covered by Plexiglas that had oxidized into a dingy gray substance — would have to be removed from their casings and stripped of the buildup.

“There were so many projects in here that it seemed it would take a lifetime for each of them,” Koenig said of the job, which involved working with wire brushes on scaffolding 16 feet high.

Over the next few years, the work of Nilson and three primary volunteers would bring the chapel back to life at bare-bones cost. Had the church hired someone, it likely would have spent nearly $200,000 on the restoration, Koenig said.

“This was an opportunity to give back,” Nilson said. “Not too many people get the chance to do that in this way.”

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Like the renovation at Ebenezer, Smith also spent 2003 peeling away layers — and at 63, he was baptized.

It wasn’t a sermon that led him to Jesus.

“I was transformed by religious art,” Smith said.

The year before, the longtime book and art lover had come upon the painting “Angel Gabriel’s Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin” while walking through the San Marco Monastery in Florence, Italy.

“I had a feeling come over me — I suddenly found myself saying that it had to be true,” Smith recalled. “I realized at that moment that this happened — that Mary was told by an angel that she would conceive the baby Jesus.”

Eventually, Smith would find himself at Ebenezer Lutheran near his home, attending Sunday School in the newly renovated chapel. He has since joined the church.

“I liked the chapel so much, but I noticed all the walls were bare,” he said.

Smith also noticed six niches along the length of both the left and right walls, as well as two spaces in the back — suitable for the 14 “Stations of the Cross” paintings he recalled seeing in a downtown antique store. He offered to have them restored and reframed for the chapel.

The congregation approved. But that left an empty space in the center of the pulpit platform.

Later while browsing a Sotheby’s catalog, he came across “The Magi.”

Smith decided to bid. He won and donated the 6-by-4-foot painting, which arrived a week later.

Smith has sat in the chapel’s wooden pews contemplating the symbolism of the piece and what its role could be in another’s restoration.

“I would not be a Christian today had I not had an encounter with that painting (at the monastery) and been transformed.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com