So if you have followed the Youtube channel or our other social media lately, you will see we have been working on a new backyard chicken coop we have called the “Chicken Church”. When we talk face to face with our friends we always get a funny look at the mention of chicken church. Some questions are: what denomination are your chickens? Who will be the preacher? Will you be passing around an offering plate?

While there are so many humorous directions we can take this theme and it may seem like this is just a gimmick to build something outlandish, there is actually some method to our madness. First, I want to say that building a chicken church is not an effort to degrade the Christian faith in any manner. On the contrary, my choice in choosing a church design is based on my desire to honor the old country churches that are slowly disappearing from the landscape of West Virginia. These old country churches bring back childhood memories of family visits on Sunday mornings, pot luck dinners (and we weren’t even Methodists), and running around with friends catching fireflies (lightning bugs ‘round here) on a hot summer’s evening.

I have had this desire for years to find an old abandoned country church that had some property with it and turn it into a camp or a bed and breakfast. There is just something about that simple building design that just draws me in. There is actually a beautiful old church in Pocahontas County that fits the bill perfectly except the congregation is still using it for Sunday worship. I would never desire for a church to fail, but if one did… Ok, maybe it would be better that they outgrow it!

A second reason Kelly and I decided to build a chicken church is for aesthetics. This is a coop that will be visible from every window on the back side of our house. It really will be a backyard coop. While chickens don’t need wall to wall carpeting or trim work, we want to be able to look in the backyard and see something that puts a smile on our face and not a grimace. The chicken church, when finished, will have a nice paint job, trimmed out metal roof, custom built front door, and many other details. I fully expect Kelly to plant flowers around it (on the sides the chickens can’t reach) and add other eye-pleasing features. One thing Kelly will not let me do, however, is add a small chicken cemetery beside the coop. Every country church has a small graveyard around back. I even had some great tombstone designs thought out already. I guess it could turn a bit ominous to look out and see chickens perched on tombstones or them scratching up “grave sites”.

A third reason is for practicality. To serve a permaculture purpose (more to come on that), the coop needed to be 8×10 and sit in this specific spot on the hill. It needed as much roof line as possible to catch as much rain as possible. Changing a basic, single-sloped roof to a gable roof and adding a steeple really wasn’t much extra effort. Gravity will play a major role in the usefulness of the coop both with providing water pressure to the garden below and by pulling wood chips and chicken manure (eventually turning to compost) to a collection point on the lowest part of the run. This fixed position, fixed run will hopefully be a soil building factory if we can get the balance correct. I am anxious to really kick that into high gear next spring. 

We currently have two flocks of chickens on the farm and hope to take the smaller group and place them in the church this winter once we have the structure solid and predator proof. The location of the coop will also allow us to have a clear view of the southern sky should we choose to add solar or we could simply run an extension cord up the hill if we wanted to add any electric features.

We hope the chicken church will provide years of practical and nostalgic benefits to our farm. We know it will always be a conversation starter when friends come to visit. There are quite a few additional details I have in mind, but I need to wait until after the chickens are using it. Make it too nice and Kelly will want to turn it into a she-shed…