TRURO — The Chapel on the Pond, a historic building that hosted a mostly Jamaican congregation until its owners said in January that they were “prayerfully repurposing” the building by putting it up for sale and telling the congregation to leave, has finally been sold.

The Truro Conservation Trust closed on the property at 17 Pond Road on Oct. 30, paying former owners Bob and Kathy Valleau of Vail, Colo. $1.54 million, Trust chair Fred Gaechter told the Independent.

A community fundraising effort in Provincetown and Truro helped finance the purchase, Gaechter said, so that Pastor David Brown’s congregation could continue to worship in the building.

“I’m so elated,” said Brown, who has led services in the church since 2017. “Expressing myself — I don’t even know how. It’s amazing what we can do when we unite.”

The intensive fundraising campaign brought people together across conventional divides of race, religion, age, and sexual orientation. Money was raised at events across the Outer Cape, from artist shows at Provincetown Commons to architectural tours of the chapel to public watch parties for RuPaul’s Drag Race.

An online appeal garnered more than 400 individual donations totaling $78,290. An anonymous donor pledged $500,000 to the cause in February and then matched another half million dollars in donations raised by Outer Cape residents.

“A community came together to make this happen,” Gaechter said.

Emmanuel Faith Ministries, Brown’s nonprofit, has now signed a five-year lease with the Truro Conservation Trust. As the lessee, Brown’s congregation will be responsible for routine maintenance and upkeep of the chapel and surrounding property, utility costs, and insurance.

The lease specifies that the chapel will also be available for rent for other community events. Emmanuel Faith Ministries will process the applications, and its decisions will be subject to approval from the Trust, which is working on establishing a chapel committee, Gaechter said.

The new arrangement provides Brown and his congregation with greater financial independence. In the past, tithes and offerings were directed to the Valleaus’ nonprofit, Boathouse Ministries, and Brown said he and his congregation had little knowledge of how that money was spent.

Emmanuel Faith Ministries has an eight-member board, and Brown said that parishioners “have rights to every affair of Emmanuel Faith.”

In all, the campaign to purchase the chapel raised $1.7 million, Gaechter said. The remaining $150,000 or so is now in a separate bank account reserved for structural improvements. The chapel’s windows, for instance, are likely to need replacing soon — a renovation that would not be part of the congregation’s routine maintenance responsibilities.

Myra Kooy, a Provincetown artist and one of the organizers of the fundraising effort, said the campaign had reinforced her faith in the Outer Cape community.

“As a Black person, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, you know that you have to work harder,” said Kooy. “But when you go to your spiritual home, your voice is allowed to be whatever your voice is.”

For the largely Black congregation, the chapel was a place where “at the end of the week, you can just rejuvenate in your space with your loved ones and make the rules,” Kooy said.

Kate Wallace Rogers, another organizer of the effort and Kooy’s partner, said the fundraiser had been “a really successful local racial justice, human-rights kind of campaign. We have a lot of people to thank.”

The Colonial Revival-style chapel, built in 1915, was once a Catholic church whose parishioners were mainly Portuguese families. With its Palladian window and historical heft, the building was deemed eligible for the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

The Conservation Trust’s choice to get involved was not simply about the building’s history, however. “We felt that if the community wanted to see this maintained as a chapel, we had a responsibility to step up and participate,” Gaechter said.

The property was never publicly listed for sale, and the acquisition process stretched on for many months after the last worship service the congregation was allowed to hold in the building on March 31. The Trust believed it had enough money on hand to make an offer on April 1, Gaechter had told the Independent, but the chapel wound up remaining empty for more than seven months.

Pastor Brown’s congregation relocated to the United Methodist Church in Wellfleet during that interval, meeting at 11:30 a.m. every Sunday after the Methodist congregation’s services ended.

Although the process took a long time, Gaechter said that negotiations with the Valleaus ultimately went well.

“The negotiations and discussions with the sellers were very good, very polite,” he said.

Delays mainly had to do with technicalities, including discussions of terminology between attorneys, he said. A final walk-through with Bob and Kathy Valleau took place in late October.

Kathy Valleau did not respond to recent inquiries from the Independent.

Brown is traveling to Jamaica this month because of a death in his family; he plans to start holding services in the chapel again in December.

A sign will soon be installed with the chapel’s new name — “Pond Village Community Chapel” — as well as the Emmanuel Faith Ministries name and logo, Gaechter said.

Wallace Rogers said she sees the chapel as a “community-building community building.” Although she worships at Provincetown’s Unitarian Universalist Meeting House, she plans to attend services at Pond Village occasionally.

Brown underlined that his services in Truro are open to all. “There are more Jamaicans here because they can identify their culture in the worshiping, the joy, the clapping, the dancing, but it is open for the community,” he said. “I am anticipating great expansion as we go along.

“It’s amazing that this is happening, that we are not in limbo,” Brown said. “We know that this is now our home; we know that this is now, so to speak, in our hands.”