St. Philip's Ev. Lutheran Church of Detroit

St. Philip’s Evangelical Lutheran Church – LCMS dates back to the early 1930’s. Some of the first organizers consisted of Mr. William Weekes, Mr. Joe Hanson, and the McBryde family. Eight members who sowed the seeds of St. Philip’s, by a very few but dedicated, diligent workers for Christ. This small group was so dedicated that church services at the time were being held at the home of Mr. William Weekes, Mrs. Mattie Woodward and her family who were Lutherans from Alabama. They then contacted Reverend H. J. Storm of Windsor, Ontario, Canada through the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. He would be instrumental in the founding of the mission’s congregation. It would become the First Negro Lutheran Congregation in Detroit, a city in 1934 of 1,568,000 people, 120,000 of them Negro.

Pastor Storm rented a small one room apartment across the street from the Negro Democratic Club on East Warren and St. Antoine Streets. He commuted every Sunday through the, then, four-year-old Windsor Tunnel to preach to the tiny congregation at ten in the morning, He would quickly return to his own congregation to preach at eleven.

On July 1, 1936, the congregation installed its first resident pastor, the Reverend Raymond R. Pollatz. A likable young man; but somewhat of a novice in the mission field. Some of St. Philip’s members determined to just wait and pray for his capabilities to show through. Almost immediately he came upon the novel idea – since he and Mr. Robert Ingram, the first president of the congregation, owned the only two cars in the church, why not use them to bring people to church?

Thus began St. Philip’s Evangelic “Taxi-Service” with Mr. Ingram going one way and Pastor Pollatz the other with a growing Sunday School and parents staying for church service. In 1937 the congregation moved to Sherrard Junior High School on East Euclid at Cameron in the North-End section of Detroit.