In 1758, a new stone church was built in Khirino in honor of the Beheading of John the Baptist on the site of an old wooden temple. For more than one and a half centuries, the church existed peacefully until the Bolsheviks took notice after the October Revolution of 1917. In March-April 1930, the OGPU arrested and convicted the leaders of the Khirino Orthodox community for anti-collective farm agitation, including priest Ivan Snovedsky and church elder Nikolai Kochetkov. On October 27, 1937, the last Khirino priest, Mikhail Znamenksy, was arrested and sentenced to execution. On January 3, 1939, at the direction of local authorities, the party and Komsomol activists organized a pogrom at the Preobrazhensky church in front of a large crowd. Since then, the church was closed to believers, and prayers ceased for more than 70 years. The church was almost completely destroyed, and the domes collapsed.

The situation changed in November 2011 when the "Foundation for the Revival of the Church of John the Baptist" was registered at the Main Department of the Ministry of Justice for the Nizhny Novgorod Region, established by I.R. Ashurbeyli with the blessing of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia. The goal of the foundation was to restore the destroyed church in the village of Khirino. This was related to the fact that Igor Ashurbeyli's great-grandfather, Grigory Stepanovich Rezanov, was born in Khirino and was baptized in this church. In 1913, he moved to Baku to work at the Nobel brothers' factories and did not return due to the revolution. On May 27, 2012, Metropolitan Georgy of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas held a solemn prayer service in the building of the destroyed church to mark the beginning of a good deed. In the same year, on September 16, the first Divine Liturgy in 75 years took place in the revived church, conducted by Metropolitan Georgy with the participation of the Arzamas and Shatkov clergy.