The First Psychic Spiritualist Church of Brightmoor

Detroit Free Press, July 24, 1929

The earliest mention that I have seen of the First Psychic Spiritualist Church of Brightmoor at 21729 Fenkell Avenue in Detroit was in an article from 1939 involving a witch hex and a ghost attack on the family of Roy and Della Tomlin, then recent transplants to the city from the nearby suburb of Livonia.

The story made the front page of one of the city's daily newspapers and Mrs. Tomlin was later found to be insane, Mr. Tomlin unfit, the children were sent into foster care and the spiritualist sect mentioned therewith and led by Rev. E. Armitage, female pastor, persisted into at least the early 2000s.

Detroit Free Press, October 25, 1931

Rev. E. was at the head of the congregation for at least a decade, and likely longer since they didn't feel a need to advertise much at all.

The October, 1931 advert announces that Rev. Amanda Flowers of Grand Rapids would give a service and a circle, presumably a psychic reading of some sort within their Spiritualist sect.

The Plymouth Mail, December 1, 1939

Parishoners seemingly came from as far as the remote western suburbs as this 1939 advert in the Plymouth Mail attests to.

There was a mid-week message service on Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. and a Sunday song service at 7:00 p.m. with a lecture at 7:30. The public was welcome. Additionally, that December there was a Ladies' Aid bazaar at the church on December 2nd at 1:30 p.m.

Chimes, November 1, 1961

After a mention or two in the psychic monthly Chimes around the early 1960s it seemed to disappear. By then it was led by the Rev. Carroll Ware, quite the ambiguous Christian name when determining gender (if that's allowed), and the Pastor, Rev. Katherine K. Cation. A developing class was offered on Tuesdays evenings at 8 p.m. and a Sunday service at 7:30 p.m.

Detroit Free Press, June 5, 1973 (enlarge 1, 2)

The church "was holding its own" by 1973, after seemingly falling off the newsworthy map, with Rev. Glenn V. Mickle at the helm. he felt that the Spiritualist message of contacting the dead had become a lukewarm concept which now had to complete with the far flashier mediums of radio and television over the preached written word.

Detroit Free Press, June 14, 1981 (enlarge)

By the 1980s it was reduced to a bit player in the punchline to a long shirking off of the subject as a marginal trifling. 

Nonetheless, The Rev. Lynn Tucker and John Wilson, presumably both of the First Psychic Spiritualist Church of Brightmoor but definitely the latter, were in charge at the house of worship.

It's demise in the following decades might have been more by attrition than due to squalor than a lack of wanting for spiritual guidance.

In the 1990 book Profits of Deceit: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Fraud by Patricia Franklin it is mentioned that the area had two motorcycle gangs, the Scorpions and Forbidden Wheels, whose virile engines provided "deafening tributes to horsepower" for the parishioners of a neighborhood riddled with fire bombs, gunshots, vacant flats and crack houses.

The next mentions are between 2001 and 2005 when a combination of the Glory of God Ministry International and the Zion Tabernacle Church are seemingly interwined, with the latter's name only appearing in print in 2003, though I haven't searched the name further.