"In July 1948 the Gospel Pioneer I crew, consisting of Frank G. Bursey, Roy W. Langdon, Maxwell Vatcher, and Charles F. Rowsell, reached Glovertown, another Bonavista Bay community. They landed at Saunder's Cove, some distance from the centre of town, and set up a tent for public services.
Alma Gordon and a neighbor attended the second meeting, then invited the preachers to erect the tent in their gardens in a more centralized location. Hedley Gordon then granted permission for them to relocate to his garden, the site of a two-week evangelistic campaign that resulted in thirty-five conversions. In addition to helping to feed the visiting pastors, the Gordons stored some of their portable equipment for a year.
Meanwhile, at Botwood Benjamin H. and Rita Elliot were sensing a divine call to the pastoral ministry. Approaching Frank G. Bursey about the possibiliity of their entering the ministry, they were informed that Glovertown, while responsive to the Pentecostal message, possessed no formal assembly. "If you're willing to pray for your breakfast, dinner, and supper," Bursey told them, "Glovertown's available." Eagerly accepting the assignment, the Elliots began serving as Glovertown's first resident pastors on October 6, 1948.
The Elliots rented a house for $10.00 a month. Using his carpentry skills, the pastor converted an old woodshed, measuring 14' x 20', into a sanctuary. "Every dollar had to be stretched to its limit," Calvin T. Andrews observed.
Brother Elliot remembers tugging at $47 until it produced a door, a 20-foot 6 x 6 inch stringer, a roll of single ply felt, three rolls of sheeting paper and three windows.
The building was filled to capacity for the opening service on a Sunday night. It was too hot for a fire in the stove. The floor sagged six inches with the large congregation seated on two rows of six-foot benches.
By November 1948 the Sunday school enrolment that climbed to seventeen and, by June 1949, forty-seven. The first concert in the woodshed turned-sanctuary was recorded in January 1949." - Excerpt from History of the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland by Burton K. James
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