Baptist pastor Bill Martin gives a sermon at the Anglican church in Pugwash, N.S. (Darren Calabrese for The Globe and Mail)

There are six churches in Pugwash, a deep-harboured village on Nova Scotia’s North Shore, and just 750 people. For a rural community where the ancestral habits of church-going are no longer automatic, within a secularizing nation where Christianity has long since lost its historic dominance, that ratio does not bode well.

The diverse denominations of Pugwash – United, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, plus the non-affiliated Meeting Place – have done the math and realized their collective future could be bleak unless they set aside the differences religions tend to generate and rediscover the fundamentals they have in common. And what better moment to demonstrate the new spirit of co-operation than during the holiest time in the church calendar?

Which is why this year’s Easter rites in Pugwash have been turned into an unprecedented series of blended religious celebrations – a public testament to local unity at a time when the wider world may be tempted to see the expression of deeply held beliefs as a source of conflict.

Throughout the week, the priests and pastors of Pugwash have been crossing denominational boundaries and sermonizing on the last words of Jesus during services in each other’s buildings, while mingled congregations seized on the opportunity to survey cross-village modes of worship normally hidden behind closed doors. Proponents of Sunday-best dress codes sit placidly alongside the come-as-you-are crowd, and the preacher on any given day is as likely to be wearing blue jeans and a polo shirt as a clerical collar or formal embroidered vestments.

This homegrown ecumenical experiment will culminate, meteorological acts of God permitting, at a harbourside park on Easter Sunday, where the resurrection of Jesus that is the foundation of the Christian faith will be commemorated at a dependably chilly sunrise service – followed by a warming breakfast and rousing songs of praise at the Meeting Place.

For Bill Martin, the Baptist minister who initiated this ecclesiastical crossover, the collaboration is an effort to get past an image problem of sectarian strife rooted in complex patterns of immigration, resettlement and theological divisiveness that produced so many separate places of worship.

“The tendency in the past was for churches to turtle in their own shells and set themselves apart because of tradition,” he said. “As a result, the public looks at us like we don’t get along or are unfriendly, or worse, that we’re fighting all the time. But the bottom line is that we have more in common than we realize, and we should be able to look past our traditions to see the things that unite us.”

The sense of tradition is powerful in Pugwash, which still celebrates a Gathering of the Clans on Canada Day to commemorate the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders who populated the region – the unified Pugwash churches plan to share a float in this year’s parade. But the village shouldn’t be stereotyped as an unchanging backwater clinging to old ways: Its Mi’kmaq name became internationally famous in the 1950s as a synonym for the global anti-nuclear movement when the native-son industrialist Cyrus Eaton hosted a series of subversive conferences in collaboration with the philosopher-activist Bertrand Russell.

The international Pugwash organization was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, and welcoming signs to the village now proclaim it to be “world famous for peace.” So it’s entirely appropriate that the more ancient movement of peace and human unity initiated by the founder of Christianity – though often waylaid over the centuries by sectarian crusaders and religious warriors – should have fostered new styles of co-operation in this idyllic setting.

Anglican minister Nicole Uzans lights candles in preparation for a special service with members of several congregations on Wednesday. (Darren Calabrese for The Globe and Mail)

In a village where everyone knows everyone else and people of different faiths work closely together during the week, the separation formal religion imposes can’t help but seem slightly surreal. “I see so many activities in the village where people are crossing any lines of division,” says Nicole Uzans, Pugwash’s Anglican priest. “In the context of local life, people are constantly ministering to each other across denominational lines, and this is the direction the churches need to be going in as well.”

She points to the village’s Christian meditation group, a spiritual exercise program that defies denominational distinctions and also draws in non-churchgoers. “The common element is that people are developing a very deep connection with each other and with God,” she says. “And inevitably we follow that up with coffee where there’s a lot of chatter and catching up with village gossip.”

Another area of community integration is the impulse for village beautification – as part of the Communities in Bloom initiative, the Anglican church aims to plant a labyrinth that can be used for outdoor meditation by spiritually inclined members of the wider community.

Individual churches, facing declining numbers due to rural depopulation and aging congregations, don’t have the clout they once had. So a pressing issue like refugee sponsorship will now be addressed by the Pugwash churches banding together into a single entity, with the hopes that the unified whole will be greater than the sum of its parts – offerings collected at a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper, for example, were donated to the North Shore Refugee Support Group.

Rev. Uzans looks around the village and sees projects both sacred and secular that would benefit from an empowered sense of Christian do-gooding – starting with Pugwash’s aging hospital.

“A rebuild of the hospital is of concern to everyone in the area,” she says, “and this is also a place where communities of faith can come together and carry out their mission in a practical way.”

As a commemoration of the early, community-based faith, Easter is a natural time for these good intentions to take practical shape. “It provides a reconnection with a kind of pristine understanding that there was once a greater unity within the Christian movement before we became enmeshed in political systems and power structures,” says Rob Fennell of the Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax. “Early Christians saw each other as brother and sister, and were willing to cross clan boundaries, even ethnic lines and master-and-slave distinctions, which at the time was crazy. This belief that you could bring together people who would never talk to each other, let alone share a meal or have anything in common, was enormously influential in driving early Christianity forward. And it’s a vision that lingers on and remains exciting, even when our practices don’t always measure up to it.”

Members of several congregations gather to worship at a special service at St. George's Anglican Church during Holy Week in Pugwash, N.S. on Wednesday, March 23, 2016. (Darren Calabrese for The Globe and Mail)

In the theologically modernizing era of the 1960s and 1970s – fostered in part by the all-inclusive principles of the peace movement developed in places such as Pugwash – an ecumenical spirit arose among Christian churches striving to end the isolation prompted by the 16th-century Reformation, when Protestants renounced the authority of popes.

The early hopes for high-level institutional unity waned as established hierarchies found it impossible to relinquish power and authority. It didn’t help that the culture wars of modern politics generated a fervent sense of religious orthodoxy and pushed liberal and conservative believers further and further apart.

But even as the great convergence failed in Christianity’s gilded corridors of power, it began to take a more practical and more urgent shape at the local level. “For small rural churches, the ability to respond to something like the refugee crisis is limited,” says Bill Martin. “But multiply by six, and suddenly we’re a bigger force for serving the community’s needs. When the Church started, there were no buildings, no traditions and styles that separated us. So we can’t sit around in our individual churches waiting for people to come and find us any more. It’s time to become part of that revolution that was started 2,000 years ago.”