Bless, Father,
Indeed they will, but the particular congregation is likely to be better able to afford it than the prior parishioners. Nashua, with all due respect to any of my NH neighbors who post here, is a city that relied chiefly on mill industry for many decades - like much of the Merrimack Valley of southern NH and northern MA. As is the case with the majority of those cities - Manchester, Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill, Nashua never really developed a sound economic base to replace that lost source of jobs and revenue. And that is a telling factor in the decreased financial support for the older, larger parishes.
The Copt congregation is largely comprised of professionals who presently travel some considerable distance to their mother parish, a beautiful temple in Natick, MA with a very large body of faithful. The distance to it, one-way, for those living in NH, is 50+ miles - a deceptively low number and, despite involving principally highway mileage, a trip that necessitates close to 90 minutes travel - longer in bad weather.
I wouldn't be surprised that they could have built for the purchase price, but suspect that they were anxious to have a temple that reflected the beauty and age of an earlier time - even if not built in their traditional style - simply because the vast majority of their churches in the diaspora are modern renderings.
Many years,
Neil
