THOMASTON – Some folks in nearby Waldoboro are creating a church from scratch.

But first, they need to take Dave’s Restaurant apart.

Four years ago, a dozen people gathered in Waldoboro to start their own congregation. They called it Wilderness Church.

Since then, the Baptist group has held Sunday services in a mobile home on Route 235 in Waldoboro and membership has risen fourfold.

Two members – Peter and Susan Moody, co-owners of Dave’s Restaurant – have provided land on their residential property for the mobile church and now the new one under construction.

After 36 years in business, Dave’s was sold recently to Maine Hospitality Group of Freeport, which plans to build a four-story, 85-room Hampton Inn Suites hotel and a yet-to-be disclosed chain restaurant there.

Instead of the new owner demolishing the Route 1 eatery, the Moodys will take it “to go,” so to speak.

They and fellow church members are tearing apart the restaurant piece by piece, then moving the materials to Waldoboro, where they are building a 60-foot-by-40-foot church that will seat 150 faithful.

The men and women of the church have rolled up their sleeves, working day and night in the salvage operation.

Earlier this week, the preacher’s wife, Linda Davis, and her sister-in-law Susan Moody worked side by side with other churchwomen, pulling nails out of pine boards as they were torn from the building.

“There’s a lot of history here,” Linda Davis said.

The Moody family is well-known for businesses in Waldoboro and Thomaston. Peter Moody and Linda Davis are siblings. Their father, Dave Moody, who died in 2000, started Dave’s Restaurant.

It was called the Flying Saucer when their father bought the Thomaston restaurant in the late 1960s.

Dave’s parents, Percy and Bertha Moody, were founders of Moody’s Diner in Waldoboro, which they opened in 1927. Dave was the only one of nine children to open his own restaurant, Linda Davis said.

The pine boards, 20 inches wide, were milled from trees on the Route 1 property many years ago, for an addition to Dave’s Restaurant.

By dismantling the building, Peter Moody figures they are saving $50,000 in materials to erect the church. Some of the items to be recycled are five 30-foot steel I-beams, 42 rafters, 250 sheets of plywood, 60 1 1/8-inch sheets of tongue-and-groove plywood, many two-by-six and two-by-four framing pieces and plenty of rough-cut pine boards.

A heating and air-conditioning system and plumbing and electrical fixtures also are being reused.

Parishioners, friends and family are helping to bring down the restaurant and build the larger church. The new building will house a church on the second floor and a garage on the ground level.

Wilderness Church members have a vision of someday worshipping in a real log cabin.

The Moodys recently bought 3.5 acres next door to give to the congregation for the future log cabin church.

Calling the log cabin the third phase of their building plan, the Rev. Murray Davis said, “It’s called the Wilderness Church so we want to keep it as moss-covered as we can.”

The logs for that church also will come from a labor of love: Davis’ nephew knows how to mill logs.

In November, a 55-foot-by-30-foot building adjacent to the restaurant, which once housed an unfinished furniture shop, was given to a friend of the Moodys’ for a home.

“You can’t give too much,” Peter Moody said. “If you give, you’ll get back. If you don’t give, you’re not going to get nothing.”

For now, the goal is to finish phase two of the building plan. The combination church and garage is half-built.

In the meantime, Sunday services will continue to be held in the mobile unit from 11 a.m. to noon. An evening service is held at 6 p.m. Wednesdays.