Wood doesn’t last forever. That’s one of the things Andrew Coleman likes about it.
“God’s the one who made wood. Its properties are what they are because he made it that way,” said Coleman, the artist and owner of Coleman’s Handcrafted Sacred Art and Fine Woodworking.
Even a substantial and ornate wooden altar, like the one he built for Our Lady of Mount Carmel in St. Francisville, Louisiana, doesn’t have the lifespan of stone or metal — especially in humid south Louisiana, where Coleman’s workshop is based. But that’s not necessarily a flaw.
Some parts of the church will last for thousands of years; some of it is designed more for the here and now. That’s true for church buildings and for the Church as an institution.
“Even if you’re going to have a church built out of marble, you can’t do it without the use of wood,” Coleman said. You need both, and there’s a wider lesson about complementarity there.
This meeting of the eternal and the temporal gets played out throughout salvation history: Some of the things God does are permanent and unchangeable; some of them are meant for a specific time and place. Coleman, who founded the company with his wife, Ashley, four years ago, tries to keep both the temporal and the eternal in mind as he works.
After studying in seminary for a year, Coleman discerned he was meant for married life — specifically, marriage to Ashley, whom he’d known since they were kids growing up in Baton Rouge. His main goal, early on, was just to support a family, so he took a job as a salesman at a septic company owned by a fellow daily Massgoer. The job wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills.
But he did long to serve the Church more directly. He’d always been interested in woodworking, ever since he built a kneeler in shop class, and gradually he began to spend more and more time woodworking as a hobby. When his pastor at Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Baton Rouge said the church’s altar rails needed restoring, he made the time to get it done.
That part-time project changed his life. A friend of the pastor who was visiting saw his work and was so impressed that he asked Coleman to build the entire sanctuary for a new church they were building in Alabama.
“It was a jump! It was like two years of work, and I was like, OK, well, I’m quitting my job to do that,” he said.
He was ready to take the leap, but Ashley was less certain. She considers that caution part of her job, along with managing the business end of the company, including social media accounts and their newsletter, The Whittler.
“That’s our dynamic. Andrew is the dreamer and the idealist, in a very positive way. Andrew is like, ‘Let’s go!’ and Ashley is like, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she laughed.
As the couple described the complementarity of their business dynamic, they took turns managing their toddler son, who spent the interview playing with his favorite toy, a calculator. Ashley is expecting another child in March.
Since that first big leap into full-time woodworking, the Colemans have been busy with commissions for churches, mostly in and around Louisiana, where both Catholicism and family ties are deeply seated.
“We’re very, very embedded in our community,” Andrew said. Much of the work they do is for priests who were friends with the Colemans before they were even ordained.
Mixing business and friendship has the potential for awkwardness, but the Colemans are overwhelmingly grateful their work is so personal.
“These different pastors are willing to trust us with these big projects that maybe they wouldn’t have trusted to someone they didn’t know personally,” Ashley said.
They’ve hit a sweet spot….
