As Detroit prepared to enter the Roaring Twenties, the city's east side was home to a number of auto plants and manufacturing facilities, all filled with young men, many of whom had left their families to seek employment. Many of them lived near these factories, but there weren't that many churches in this decidedly non-residential part of the city. Enter St. Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church.
This congregation was born from the ashes of the former Burns Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, at Burns and Agnes streets, which was destroyed by fire on Nov. 16, 1916. Defective pipes on its furnace were blamed. That church had been built 12 years earlier. It took four engine companies and two truck companies to douse the flames. The blaze attracted such a crowd, "police had difficult in maintaining the fire lines," the Detroit Free Press reported the following morning. Only the walls remained standing, and the church was written off as a total loss.
Meanwhile, the Kercheval Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church was struggling. This led the two congregations to merge and form St. Mark's Methodist Episcopal, organizing on Jan. 2, 1917. Its articles of incorporation were filed March 17, 1917. St. Mark's would be open to all creeds and denominations.
First up was finding a pastor to lead the fledgling consolidated congregation of 1,000 members. In May 1917, William H. MacClenthen announced that he was leaving the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Pontiac, Mich., to lead the new church.
Next up, was erecting a new building to house the new congregation, but with World War I waging in Europe, construction was slowed. In the interim, services were held at the Odd Fellows Temple on Parkview Avenue near Kercheval Avenue.
A helluva church
The flock would settle at East Jefferson Avenue and Garland Street on the city's east side, across from Water Works Park. The father-daughter duo of Butterfield & Butterfield (Wells D. and Emily Butterfield) was tapped for the project. The Bryant & Detwiler Construction Co. were tasked with building it. Renderings for the project were unveiled in the Aug. 25, 1918, edition of the Free Press.
"When social settlements, institutional work and other uplift movements are mentioned, the mind of the average Detroiter instinctively reverts to that portion of the city commonly referred to as the "east side," which has the ghetto at its focal point," the Free Press wrote that day. "Surely, here is a need for missionary work, as everyone at all familiar with the district will fervently asseverate. ... The effete lower east side of Detroit is shortly to become the possessor of a church that for completeness of equipment and facilities for doing institutional work will have no equal among Protestant bodies in the city, if it is rivaled by any other religious creed."
The paper noted that the $250,000 going into the church and its programs - the equivalent of about $5.6 million in 2024, when adjusted for inflation - was "a lot of money for a congregation where even near-millionaires are unknown. But St. Mark's is looking beyond the present to the future needs of the neighborhood in which it is situated, and is proceeding along lines that should enable it to care for every contingency for all time."
The partially completed church opened May 25, 1919. In the interim, services were held in its gymnasium. The style of the church was a radical departure from traditional church architecture in the city up to this point, with the Free Press noting Aug. 25, 1918, that it "outwardly reminds one more of an apartment house or a public building."
The church was officially dedicated Feb. 8, 1920, in a ceremony led by Bishop Theodore S. Henderson and assisted by MacClenthen and former pastor W.J. Palmer. At the morning service, some $18,000 was raised toward paying off the church. The dedicatory program continued the entire week, with the exception of Saturday. Mayor James Couzens and members of the Common Council attended a civic and industrial program held that Wednesday, Feb. 11, 1920.
"St. Mark's church surpasses many an institutional church in one respect - it has a roof garden," the Free Press marveled Feb. 9, 1920. "All the rest of the modern features, such as billiard and chess rooms, reading rooms, bowling alleys, large auditorium, gymnasium, dining rooms, Sunday school rooms and motion picture equipment, are incorporated in this serviceable seven-days-a-week church building."
The auditorium was built with a bowled floor in amphitheater form with room for 989 souls. A Sunday school room opened into the main auditorium that could bring an additional 650 seats with listening range to the pulpit. Around the auditorium were the pastor's study, the church office, choir rooms, committee rooms and the aforementioned Sunday school room.
The mezzanine level had a large dining room and a kitchen. The balcony floor had an Epworth League room with fireplace, parlors and classrooms, with a balcony on three sides of the main auditorium that could hold 500 people.
The gym had a balcony for spectators, a Boy and Girl Scouts room, bowling alley, "quiet games" room, lockers and showers for both boys and girls, and another complete kitchen.
The aforementioned roof garden was a more than just a place for flowers, as it had dumb waiter service to the kitchen and a screened tennis court. The 80-by-128-foot roof garden was surrounding by a promenade.
The paper quoted an unnamed church leader as saying, "Surprise has been occasioned in some quarters by our temerity in starting such an institution in a district that to the uninformed seems to possess so few possibilities. They seem to forget that distance is no longer a factor to be taken into account as it once was. If you give the people what they want, they will go to it."
The church set out to help the community by launching a program in 1920 for the unemployed, "to provide idle men with a clubhouse where they can meet to play games, read or talk," the Free Press reported Dec. 27 of that year. A large room at the church was stocked with books and magazines, and the church's gym was opened on afternoons for "young men who have no other place to go (and) exercise their muscles there."
The star of St. Mark's
On Jan. 30, 1921, it was reported that some 3,000 people attended services at the church to witness the dedication of a revolving electric cross at the top of the building. Though churches at this time were known for their awe-inspiring architecture, they weren't known for glitzy, over-the-top, head-turning publicity stunts. It might not seem like a big deal now, but at the time, this whirling cross was a real talker around town, and became what the church was known for. It was even mentioned in an article 50 years later, long after the cross had stopped spinning.
The cross could be seen across the Detroit River in Canada, and bootleggers were said to have used it as a beacon while crossing the river at night under the cover of darkness.
This spiritual spectacle was the brainchild of the Rev. William Stidger, who led the church from 1920 to September 1925. Stidger actually invented the design for the cross, having brought it with him to Detroit after having erected a similar holy showstopper in San Francisco in 1913.
Under Stidger's stewardship, St. Mark's congregation grew to more than 3,000 members, becoming one of the largest Methodist congregations in the Midwest. It was said that some parishioners would bring picnic lunches to eat on the church lawn in order to secure their spots inside for the evening service. Now, it wasn't just the cross that had folks lining up to get into St. Mark's during the 1920s. Stidger was said to have a "somewhat unorthodox" ministry style and was a showman on the pulpit. A Mrs. J.H. McDonald told the Free Press for an Oct. 9, 1929, story, that "Mr. Stidger (has a) reputation as a sensational pastor who would say anything to get his name into the paper."
He also wrote 53 books over the course of his life, mostly religious in nature, but there was "Those Amazing Roosevelts" in 1944 and "Henry Ford - The Man and His Motives" in 1923.
But what really made him a star was that he was an early pioneer in religious broadcasting, holding 15-minute radio sermons airing nationally five days a week for several years. These segments, sponsored by Fleischmann's Yeast Co., paid him $1,000 a week - the equivalent of almost $19,000 in 2024 valuation. This was said to have made him the highest paid minister in the country, so he was basically the early 20th-century equivalent of a televangelist. It also apparently made him the unwitting subject of a controversial novel and film.
Indeed, as the story goes, it was Stidger who gave author Sinclair Lewis the idea to write his controversial 1927 novel "Elmer Gantry."
Lewis had met Stidger in 1922, when both were staying at a hotel in Terre Haute, Ind., and got around to talking about Lewis' latest novel. The Detroit pastor urged Lewis to write a novel about clergymen as they really are. "It was," the Detroit Free Press quipped in a Sept. 22, 1987, article, "a suggestion Stidger would live to regret."
That's because the book is a satire on the power of fundamentalist religion and the repression of free thought. In it, the titular character is a heavy-drinking, women-chasing, fast-talking traveling salesman who changes careers after he realizes there is money to be in peddling religion (in particular, the Methodist variety, and Stidger was a Methodist preacher). It was made into a 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, whose movie poster read, "Tell 'em, Gantry ... save 'em from sin ... lead 'em to salvation ... tell 'em about everything - but not about your whiskey and your women!"
Lewis even spent time with Stidger in Detroit, presumably at St. Mark's, and, according to "Sinclair Lewis: An American Life" by Mark Schorer, Stidger was the model for the Gantry character, at least in some ways.
Stidger "brought to his pulpit the methods of vigorous salesmanship, not to say vaudeville, decorated his churches with revolving illuminated crosses and published books on church methods with such titles as 'Standing Room Only'," Schorer wrote. "Unaware of the kind of novel that 'Elmer Gantry' was to be, he went about ... boasting that the central character was to be modeled after himself."
After reading the book, Stidger accused Lewis of having written the book while drunk.
Stidger left St. Mark's two years before the book was released for Kansas City, and rounded out his life as a professor at the Boston University School of Theology. He died of a heart attack on Aug. 7, 1949. He was succeeded at St. Mark's by the The Rev. James Thomas, who served the church until 1929, when he took over a church in Cincinnati. The St. Mark's pulpit then fell to the Rev. Everett Seymour, who took over just as Detroit was about to feel the wrath of an economic disaster of biblical proportions.
The Great Depression paralyzed Detroit's economy in the mid-1930s, as many Americans were unable to afford food, let alone new automobiles. Plants in the neighborhood cut shifts. Parts suppliers closed up shop. Many of those who moved to Detroit for these jobs left. By some accounts, the church lost 1,000 congregants during the 1930s. That number would continue to dwindle for the next several decades, and at some point, that cross in the sky stopped turning.
Resurrecting the cross
In 1956, a church bowling league that "rolled the rock" on two alleys in the basement of St. Mark's ran a tournament to raise money for an interesting cause.
This group set out to bring back Stidger's cross. When mechanical difficulties arose in attempting to restore the original, they had one re-created and named it, fittingly, the William L. Stidger Memorial Cross.
The 11-foot neon cross was fabricated by signmaker Kenneth Townsend. Though he was a Presbyterian, not a Methodist, Townsend did so happen to be a kindred bowling spirit. He volunteered to furnish the labor and know-how if the bowling league paid for the parts and materials. He even gave it a special wind-compensating bearing to ensure it would rotate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. A plaque was added to the lobby of St. Mark's to tell the story of the old and new crosses.
In January 1960, the Detroit Times reported that thieves broke into the church and forced open a huge wall safe - only to take a roll of 500 4-cent stamps, 400 6-cent stamps and two watches that had been left in pews.
From empty Methodist church to HQ for the COGIC
By the 1970s, the steady decline in attendance that had started in the 1930s left just 125 members to pay clergy salaries and for the upkeep of the massive building. In 1972, St. Mark's was looking for a new pastor, and when the church failed to be assigned one during that year's annual conference of the United Methodist Church, it was decided to pull the plug on what had once been one of the largest Methodist churches in the Midwest. The plug had already been pulled on the Stidger Memorial Cross, which had long since stopped spinning, either to save on electricity bills or because there was no money to repair it.
That June, news broke that the church would be closed and that officials of St. Mark's had voted to hand the property over to the Methodist Union, a mission agency in Detroit. However, St. Mark's members "stipulated that 'any proceeds on sale or lease of the building must stay in the inner city'," the Detroit Free Press reported June 8, 1972.
By March of 1976, the church had become home to the regional headquarters of the Northeast Michigan Churches of God in Christ and rebranded the Cathedral Center (and later the Cathedral Conference Center).
Space in the massive building was also rented to other congregations, such as the Revival Tabernacle Church of Christ, which was a tenant in the building until November 1991, when it moved to 3627 Mt. Elliott.
Today, the building still serves as the jurisdictional headquarters for Northeast Michigan Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ (COGIC) Inc., which covers more than 80 local COGIC churches and missions.
The building was renamed the Brooks Cathedral Center in honor of Bishop Phillip A. Brooks, who was the longest serving jurisdictional prelate in Michigan history at 45 years, from 1975 until his death on April 9, 2020. Zachary Neal Hicks was named his successor on June 23, 2021.
And yes, the Stidger Memorial Cross is still perched on top of the building - a gloriously quirky, if tragically overlooked, piece of Detroit history.