The word for it in Norwegian is dugnad — unpaid collective work for a shared purpose, the mechanism by which small Norwegian communities have historically got everything done that no authority was going to do for them. Susendal Church was raised on dugnad by the people of the valley, with help from local businesses and from Hattfjelldal Municipality, to plans by the architect Jim Inge Bøasæter.

What they built is a long church of notched log timber, brown rather than white, seating about 150 — more than twice the capacity of the chapel it replaced, in a valley whose population was not growing. Bishop Larsen consecrated it on 14 October 2001. The building was not finished on that date, and nobody pretended it was. Work carried on afterwards in the same manner it had started: the altarpiece was consecrated in March of the following year, and the pews went in later still. A church a community builds itself gets finished at the pace the community can manage.

The altarpiece is a triptych of three paintings by Karl Erik Harr, one of Norway's best-known painters of northern landscape and coastal life, born in Kvæfjord in Troms in 1940 and made a knight of the Order of St. Olav in 2001. The subject he chose speaks directly to the room it stands in.

On the left panel is the sower, from the parable in which the word of God is scattered like seed on ground of varying quality. In the centre is the birth at Bethlehem. On the right, a woman holds out the crop that the sower's work produced. Susendal is a farming valley — agriculture is its principal livelihood — and this is one of the rare cases where a church's central image and its congregation's working year describe the same thing. People who spent the summer sowing and the autumn bringing in a harvest look up at a picture of sowing and harvest.

The 1916 chapel was never torn down. It still stands barely a hundred metres from the church that replaced it — the two buildings within easy sight of one another, one holding services, one holding its shape. Hattfjelldal Museum looks after the old chapel now, along with the Gammelbutikken, the old shop at Kroken further along the valley.

There is something honest in the arrangement. The valley did not pretend the chapel had never existed, and it did not sentimentalise it either. The building was worn out and was said so plainly by a bishop; the community accepted the judgment, kept the structure, and put up a better one alongside. Susendal Church is one of three in the Hattfjelldal parish, with the main church at Hattfjelldal itself and services also held at Varntresk.

Susendal — Såvsoenvuemie in Southern Sámi — is a valley in Hattfjelldal Municipality, close to the Swedish border, with Børgefjell National Park for a neighbour. Local explanation of the name points at the river: wherever you stand in the valley, people say, you can hear the Susna running.

That river starts where Tiplingelva and Harvassbekken meet, runs the full length of Susendal, and is joined at Hattfjelldal by the Unkerelva, at which point it stops being the Susna and becomes the Vefsna — at 163 kilometres, the largest river in Nordland, bound north for the fjord at Mosjøen. The valley remains busy for its size, with its own kindergarten and village school and a handful of local firms. It is a place that has kept the habit of doing its own building.