Two years ago, when a huge winter storm cut power to the Vashon Community Care Center, members of the Church of the Holy Spirit saw a role for their small, mission-oriented congregation.

Gib and Deb Dammann, congregants and active members in Vashon’s emergency preparedness community, bought a $3,500 generator, powered it up and helped the nursing home heat the second floor of its building, where residents had been shivering for a couple of days.

The church became a designated Red Cross shelter, with an eye towards supporting residents of the care center, homeless people or others in need of a warm place, should calamity strike again. The diesel-powered generator was considered key to the church’s role in emergency support, Gib Dammann said.

Last week, however, someone stole the generator and a chainsaw from an outbuilding behind the Episcopalian church. Dammann, the church’s interim priest Kate Wesch and others are disheartened by the theft, an act that likely required considerable forethought and planning; it takes four strong people to lift the huge generator, Dammann said.

“It was meant to provide a safety net for the community,” he added. “And now it’s gone.”

The act is particularly troubling because it comes on the heels of several smaller incidents the church has faced in recent months, forcing it to start locking its sanctuary at night for the first time in years.

Congregants took pride in the fact that theirs was the only sanctuary open 24/7 on Vashon, providing a place for those in need of an after-hours place to worship or pray, Wesch and others said. But members started noticing items missing, candles moved and other incidents that caused alarm. What’s more, a few times Wesch and another woman who works at the church entered the sanctuary early in the morning and encountered a sleeping body.

In November, after a lot of discussion, the congregation made the difficult decision to lock its sanctuary at night, Wesch said.

“We really agonized over it,” said Katharine Golding, the church’s senior warden.

Determined to continue to offer a spiritual refuge for night-time worshippers, however, the church now keeps its foyer unlocked, where members have created a corner they hope invites prayer: a bench with a place to kneel, a tapestry on one wall, a cross on another and the Book of Common Prayer next to a lamp on a table.

And in the unlocked bathroom, the church has placed items that might help others in need. Socks sit in a box and colorful, hand-knitted hats on the counter. A box full of toiletries has also been placed in the bathroom.

“It’s very important to our members to offer a safe, silent place to go and be quiet and pray, for parishioners and non-parishioners,” Wesch said. “It’s a source of pride for people in the parish that the church remains unlocked.”

“We’ve done the best we could to offer a place for Islanders,” added Golding.

The church, with a congregation of 250, has a strong sense of mission, members said. Once a week, it hosts the Wednesday Night Dinners, a long-standing interfaith effort on Vashon to offer a warm, nutritious meal to anybody who feels the need; some come for the companionship as much as the meals. The socks-and-hats mission has been going on for some time; when supplies run low, Debbie Butler, the church’s secretary, sends out an e-mail, and parishioners respond.

Thus, it only felt right to step up and provide help to the community care center when it lost power for five days in December 2006, Gib Dammann said. The church was already an evacuation site for the center, which is across the street from the church and houses about 70 residents in assisted living and skilled nursing settings.

“They were prepared to take a lot of the second-floor folks off the Island,” Dammann recalled. “They were freezing up there.”

Susan Tuller, the community care center’s director, said she was amazed when church members “showed up on our front steps” with the generator. It was an act of great generosity and came at a time of need, she said.

“I can’t say enough good things about them,” she said of the parish’s members. “They’ve been great neighbors.”

Dammann said the generator and chainsaw, located in a locked outbuilding, were part of a growing inventory of items he and other parishioners had contributed to ensure the church could assist Islanders during emergencies and other incidents. The door to the outbuilding showed no signs of a forced entry, he said. Many people knew where the key was hidden, because of the community-oriented nature of the church, he added.

He discovered the theft last Wednesday morning, after seeing the generator in the outbuilding two days before, so he believes the theft occurred Monday or Tuesday night of last week, he said. How ironic and troubling, he added, if it took place on Tuesday, when President Barack Obama was inaugurated, calling the country to step forward with a renewed sense of community service.

“We’ve got to help each other,” Dammann said. “That’s what the Wednesday Night Dinners are all about. That’s what this church is all about. … That kind of thing is very much what defines Vashon.”

Dammann and other parishioners said they’re also troubled by the incident because it seems like another in a string of acts of church vandalism — from the breaking of the stained glass window at Vashon Presbyterian Church to the theft of a safe from St. John Vianney Catholic Church.

But the church has insurance, will replace the generator and won’t be deterred by this setback, he said.

“This was a loss for the community, but hopefully we’re going to be able to rebuild and replace what was stolen and start over again,” Dammann said.