A Louisiana church took to the heavens to bring a Christmas service to the masses – spraying vast amounts of holy water over its rural parish from a low-flying crop duster airplane.

The Rev Matthew Barzare blessed 100 gallons of water that members of his congregation loaded on to the small plane at an airstrip near St Anne church in Abbeville, checking first that all pesticides had been flushed through.

“It’s an isolated parish and this was a way of bringing people together at the holidays,” Barzaere told the Guardian. “I have a large area to cover, we measure it by the numbers of families rather than square footage.”

The Roman Catholic church posted photographs on the Diocese of Lafayette’s Facebook page of Barzare and parishioners loading up the water, prompting commentators to suggest other areas of Louisiana in need of a good aerial blessing, such as traffic-heavy stretches of the I-10 between Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

Barzare gave the pilot instructions to focus on areas of south-west Louisiana where people gathered, such as stores, schools and other churches that he is responsible for.

Barzare said blessing crops with holy water is a generations-old ritual for the church. “It has roots in what we call the Ember Days, when Catholic priests would travel around the rural parishes, particularly at harvest time, and bless the fields and the crops and the community that tends them,” he said.

Barzare said the flight was so popular he intends to make it a Christmas tradition for his 200-family parish, next year with three times the amount of water.

“We weren’t expecting it to get the publicity it did. It was just a small thing we were doing in the parish, then the diocese posted the photographs on Facebook. We’ll be planning to do it again next year. We can bless a larger area with 300 gallons of water than we can with 100,” he added.