The Church of Scientology has owned the former Standard Savings & Loan building in downtown Detroit for a decade but has done nothing with it. That's about to change.

The Los Angeles-based church has been issued a building permit for $8 million worth of work to the 50,000-square-foot building at the corner of Griswold Street and Jefferson Avenue.

The permit was issued Monday and calls for interior and exterior renovations, according to online city records. The contractor is Sterling Heights-based Roncelli Inc.

"The building will house the Church of Scientology of Detroit and is part of the Church's international program to service its parishioners in 'ideal' Churches," Karin Pouw, international spokeswoman for the church, said in an email to Crain's on Wednesday.

"The Church will have a chapel, rooms for parishioners to study the religion and public areas for community meetings and activities."

Construction work will start "soon," Pouw said.

She added that the church has expanded more in the last decade than it had in the previous 50 years combined.

"In the last year alone, we have opened new churches in Copenhagen, Miami, San Fernando Valley, Auckland, Budapest, Sydney, San Diego and Harlem, adding to the more than 50 new churches opened in recent years."

The Southfield office of Los Angeles-based CBRE Inc. is listing the church's 15,100-square-foot Farmington Hills building at 28000 Middlebelt Rd. for sale for $1.5 million.

The staff of the Farmington Hills building will form the core of the staff at the new Detroit building, Pouw said.

The 50,000-square-foot downtown building was built in 1930 and was home to Standard Savings bank. Its most recent tenant was Raymond James, whose sign still adorns the nine-story building's roof.

The church proposed removing that sign and replacing it with a Church of Scientology sign, but that proposal was scuttled by Detroit City Council.

The church paid $3.5 million for the building in October 2007, a rate of $70.07 per square foot, according to CoStar Group Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate information service.

It sits just east of the 150 West Jefferson skyscraper, owned by Southfield-based Redico LLC, and across Jefferson from Hart Plaza.