You could get the congregants to take turns!
No one up there has a barn? I would think you could stick it in a barn then make a plastic enclosure around and over that and maybe you could keep the heat in. OR ... skip that paint and put gold leaf on it. Will last a LONG time
The gold on it is gold leaf... held up great.
The paint has all been done on the cross.. a light blue to match the old cross, and the church trim.
But the old cross swelled up and cracked the dome some... so the cracks need to be patched.... the gold paint we picked up doesn't match the gold leaf..
Hack, hack, wheeze
Maybe we could buy just a tiny bit of gold leaf to cover over the fixed cracks.... once the cracks are fixed.
I am not to worried about the cracks and the patching over the cracks (except the thought of buying gold leaf hurts me), because that isn't terribly temperature sensitive.
But we need to warm up the dome enough, and dry out the rotted bits enough so that the rot can be scraped out and replaced with wood fill.
It is the wood fill that is so darn temperature specific. The wood fill says a MINIMUM of 50F.
We have both a garage/shop and a barn... but both have dirt floor, and neither are insulated.
We tried the first day heating up the shop/garage (way smaller building than the barn) we got it up to 32.
Today we set up a tent inside the shop/garage with the dome inside the tent. Heat in the tent. We almost got to 50.
Tonight we added a space blanket cover over the tent....
The other pain is that it turns out that deeper down in the hole that the cross slides into... they turned the hole from square... to round!

To get the already finished cross in there as is... we WOULD HAVE TO REDUCE THE BOTTOM OF THE POST ON THE CROSS! Make it from square to a smaller round!
We spent a MONTH on that cross, spackling up all uneven bits, sanding perfectly smooth, multiple coats of primer, multiple coats of marine grade paint. Lots of layers... sanding between layers... wet sand finish... perfection.
No way do we want to ruin all of that work on the cross... so we need to change the hole size.
Not a problem... if we weren't in a time crunch....
Might all work great.... might not. Weather dropped real cold, pond is tightly frozen solid.... but no snow yet.
Winter has been crazy late this year... the question is can it hold off until we are done? And how fast can we get it done?