740 East Grand Boulevard
Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, Trinity Deliverance Church
The organization that would eventually build the structure pictured here traces back to 1863. The Union Mission Sunday School was started that year by Zebulon R. Brockway, the Detroit House of Corrections superintendent. John S. Newberry and Senator James McMillan were involved, too.
Later on, Brockway started the Brockway Mission. The organization met at the Bishop Union School at Prospect and Hastings Street before bouncing around a bit, finally landing at a small church at Napoleon and Russell in Eastern Market. Eventually, they built a larger structure there. Around 1889, the congregation changed its name to the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. Eastern Market was rapidly expanding, and the group needed to move to escape the meat packers.
On June 29, 1907, the cornerstone for a new church was laid at the corner of Preston and Grand Boulevard. Reverend E. G. Hildner was the pastor at the time. The structure, designed by William E. N. Hunter. was completed in 1908.
The church was large enough for the congregation to expand, but even optimistic predictions for Detroit’s growth were blown out of the water. In 1900, the population hovered just under 300,000 people, climbing over 465,000 in 1910 and nearly reaching a million in 1920. Similar to Detroit, the Church of the Covenant was growing.
In 1914, a rectory was built next door, which still stands today. In 1923, the original church was enlarged from a capacity of 400 to meet the congregation’s growing needs. The work enabled the church to host 1,300 parishioners, and a large building was added onto the east side of the structure to house Sunday School operations. According to the Detroit Free Press, the classrooms could accommodate 550 kids.
At the time, Reverend Platte T. Amstutz was in charge. His congregation was mostly Germans, but as Detroit expanded and Detroit’s melting pot started to boil, various nationalities walked through the door, but members were almost exclusively white.
On April 14th, 1943, the church burned the mortgage for the building they had constructed nearly four decades earlier. The addition and onset of the Great Depression certainly impacted the balance; however, the structure had hosted numerous luncheons, choir events, community meetings, garage sales, and other neighborhood functions and continued to do so. Throughout the 1940s, Reverend L. Wendell Taylor ran the show.
By the early 1950s, Detroit was already changing dramatically. Although the population remained steady and many men still had incredible wealth from Detroit’s sprawling factories, people began moving around. The advent of the car and larger roadways made it easier to keep your job in the city and move further into the suburbs. This would be exacerbated in the 1960s and 1970s, but the writing was on the wall.
Between 1955 and 1958, the Church of the Covenant opened a ‘colony church’ on Stephens Drive. The old church chugged onward, but some services, events, and educational operations occurred at their second location. This is indicative of where Detroit’s population was going.
In 1959, the Church of the Covenant was one of 12 churches selected to participate in a new program run by the Presbyterian Church. They realized that their urban congregations were struggling and aimed to address those issues. According to the Detroit Free Press, “The undertaking is aimed particularly at stimulating church work in dense areas of urban-renewal housing projects.”
A few points of the plan were to:
Fully integrate the churches in the program and offer financial backing to those who lose income because of it. If white parishioners left because of non-whites joining the congregation, they got supplemental funding.
Offer special training for pastors at churches in congested urban areas. Being a pastor at Grand Boulevard and Preston is different than running a church in the Keweenaw Peninsula, and those pastors need other skills.
Train a field staff of roving experts that could travel across the country to implement good ideas at churches in cities that were struggling to stay open. When diving into new waters, it’s essential to know what you’re doing; this staff would be trained to do that.
Last, the pilot program would be limited to a dozen churches and expanded to others around the country after the process was refined. Initially, the program was run in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and San Francisco.
I haven’t found anything to say how successful the program was nationally; however, the Church of the Covenant was open for another two decades, which could be seen as successful considering Detroit lost a half million people in that period.
In 1981, the Church of the Covenant merged with Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church to form Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. The structure at 740 East Grand Boulevard, pictured here, was vacated, and the new congregation moved into ‘St. Curvey’ at 8501 Woodward Avenue. The congregation left the Presbyterian Church in the early 1990s and remained open until 2005. Since then, it’s been abandoned and heavily vandalized and photographed. Renovation efforts began a few years ago but have teetered off.
Back on the Boulevard, the old Church of the Covenant buildings were sold to Trinity Deliverance Church. This congregation was founded in 1970, initially meeting in a small structure at Grand River and Euclid before moving into a building on Wyoming. By 1982, the congregation was utilizing the space at the corner of Grand Boulevard and Preston.
Up until around the pandemic, Trinity Deliverance Church was still utilizing the space. Since then, it’s started to fall into disrepair. The bones are good—however, in another year or two, in its current state, it will be hit by scrappers, vandals, and urban explorers more heavily than it already has.
The neighborhood surrounding it is healthy; however, finding a use for a church this large other than for religion is difficult. But, as I’ve mentioned on this page, it’s far from impossible.
Hopefully, someone will rescue this one before too much damage is done.
