Some of the pieces resembled enormous wooden kazoos. Others looked like oversized vacuum cleaner tubes. But to the crowd assembled on the lawn of the Severna Park church, each of the thousands of oddly shaped segments was created to do one thing: evoke the voice of the divine.

For nearly two decades, the parishioners of St. Martin's-in-the-Field Episcopal Church in Severna Park dreamed of hearing pipe organ music in their sanctuary each Sunday. A few years ago, they started raising money - to the tune of nearly half a million dollars - and ordered an organ to be custom-built for the church.

The organ, including each of the 1,349 pipes, arrived in a tractor-trailer this week. Workers will need about three weeks to assemble and tune the instrument. And then the church will resonate with a new sound.

"A pipe organ is meant to put the voice of God into everything," says Doris Buchanan Johnson, rector of the church.

The Anne Arundel County congregation, which was founded more than a half-century ago, moved to a new church building in 1989. A pipe organ-shaped spot remained bare on the left wall. Church members sang along with a small electric organ at services.

"The electric organ that we had before was dying," said David Bourdon, a member of the choir. "It would stop every now and then in the middle of a song, but we'd keep singing along."

Then, in 2005, a parishioner who wanted to remain anonymous donated about half the money needed to buy an organ. Others chipped in the remainder and soon the church had the approximately $460,000 needed to buy an organ.

They contacted Schantz Organ Co. of Ohio, one of the country's largest makers. Workers traveled to the church to test its acoustics while curious parishioners watched. "They would go around different spots in the church and go 'Whoop, whoop, whoop,'" recalled Vee Mitchell, St. Martin's junior warden. Soon the workers had created a map of places where the sanctuary absorbed sounds and places where it bounced them back.

Then the process of building the organ began. Designers drew plans for a majestic instrument that would suit the bright sanctuary with its high, sloped ceiling. Woodworkers crafted curved panels from planks of maple and poplar wood. Other workers hammered sheets of metal into pipes. Musicians tested the purity of the sounds.

In the end, almost all of the company's 100 employees worked on some part of the organ, said Bob Betty, a company representative.

Workers spent a week gathering the pieces of the organ and loading them in a truck. Then, just before dawn Monday, they left Ohio.

When they arrived at the Severna Park church Monday, they found a crowd of about two dozen parishioners waiting in front of the church, many clicking photographs to document the moment.

Lillian La Porte, 80, who sings with the choir, embraced friends as the truck pulled in. Then her eyes grew wide as workers lifted the door of the trailer, exposing hundreds of wooden chests, pieces of scaffolding and pipes wrapped in blankets.

"I think that's going to fill the entire sanctuary and we're not going to have any room for chairs," she said, laughing.

Church members ferried one mysterious object after another off the truck and into the building - rattling plastic suitcases, rectangular wooden pipes as thick as fire hydrants, thick corrugated tubes.

One member, Harold "Doc" Bohlman, looked rather like a moving photograph as he carried what appeared to be a giant photo frame into the church. Others carried an elaborate pulley, wrenches longer than their arms and countless strangely shaped pieces of metal.

"It's a Dr. Seuss organ," joked Lori Skalitsky of Crofton.

Today, workers will continue to assemble the roughly 20-foot-tall organ, as they will for the next two weeks. It will rise up a wall that has a small door midway between the floor and ceiling - for working on the organ - that, according to church lore, one second-grader at the church's parochial school thought was a door to heaven.

Workers will let the organ settle and adjust to the climate for a week before they tune it.

"The organ won't be ready to work on until it gets used to its new place," said Betty, of the organ company.

The congregation has several organ concerts planned for the coming months, said Adam Koch, the church's music director and organ master, but the sounds will be most enjoyed during Sunday services.

Koch said, "I think it will really inspire the congregation to sing."

julie.scharper@baltsun.com