After 20 burglaries, a Detroit church struggles to survive They came to the city to rebuild a neighborhood. But the devil, they say, is trying to stop them.

John Carlisle | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption A look at a Detroit church struggling to survive A suburban pastor says God told him to move his ministry to Detroit. His church has had nothing but problems ever since. Ryan Garza

They don’t want to flee from Detroit. They’d like to continue the work they came here to do. But the devil is doing his best to stop them.

“I just wanted to make a change, man,” said Apostle Michael Beasley, the 55-year-old pastor of Total Life Change Ministries on the city’s west side. “I want to stay, but I can’t tell you I don’t get moments where I’ve thought about leaving.”

His church is located inside a defunct elementary school near Greenfield and Tireman. Just a few years ago, he had a nice home and a successful church in the suburbs. Then, he said, he heard the voice of God tell him to move to Detroit, buy this massive school and help rebuild a neighborhood. He followed the call. And his church has been beset by thieves and robbers ever since.

Over and over, someone keeps breaking into the building, methodically stealing the copper pipes and copper wiring, leaving the church without water or power. Time and again, the congregation has sealed every crack and crevice they could find. But the scrappers keep forcing their way inside. During one stretch this summer alone, they got into the building seven times in two weeks. Once, faced with barricaded windows and doors, the thieves just sledgehammered their way through a wall to get in.

“I don’t get it,” said Elder Jakenya Robinson, 38, the church administrator and pastor's sister. “I don’t understand how someone can do that to a church.” She noted the programs they’ve offered in their few years here, including free breakfasts and lunches for neighborhood kids, a summer jobs program for teens and block parties for the neighborhood, all of which were canceled this year because of the damage to their building. “There’s different things they’re stopping us from being able to do. Every time that we think that we’re making headway, this happens.”

An old school like this is a sprawling network of valuable pipes and wires, and dozens of similarly vacated schools in the city have been scrapped and looted until they were hollowed shells. The difference here is, there’s a church inside.

“It makes me sad that we’ve been doing what we can to help the community, and it kind of feels like it’s not appreciated,” Robinson said. “It makes me angry that someone would have the audacity to even come in here like that.”

The looting might be the work of a desperate and determined addict. It could be someone from the neighborhood who can see when the congregation is away.

Whoever it is, they know what they’re doing. They know how to turn off electricity to the part of the building they want to steal wires from, and they how to turn off water to the copper pipes they want to steal. Whoever it is keeps coming back, no matter how many times the police are called, no matter what barriers are put in their way.

And now the congregation must decide whether it’s time to just give up and go.

“I want to stay, but I gotta be able to secure this better, and I don’t know how,” Beasley said. “We’ve got steel doors; that didn’t stop them. We’ve got the iron nets on windows, drilled holes in doors to put chains inside, put two by fours. We’ve come up with all different methods to keep them out. And they always find a way.”

A man on a mission

In the beginning was the word, and the word was from God, who told his apostle to leave behind everything he had and return to his roots.

“The Lord spoke to me and told me, 'I’m sending you back to the deep-water fish,’” Beasley said. “I’m like, ‘What’s the deep-water fish?’ And the Lord said, ‘Detroit.’ I said, ‘Are you sure you want me to go back there?’ ”

Beasley was raised on Detroit’s west side before joining the Marines, then becoming a prison guard in Jackson, and later a truck driver. But all along, he said, he felt the calling of the pulpit. He’d preached as a child in the church where he was raised, and the urge never left him. Two decades ago, he founded his own ministry in the suburbs.

Back then, life was good. “I was in Eastpointe,” he said. “Never had a break-in. You could leave the doors unlocked a whole weekend, and you’d come back and none of your stuff would be gone.”

Five years ago, he announced to his flock that God told them to move to Detroit, where they were most needed. But many of the 80 or so congregants refused to follow, and instead scattered to other suburban ministries.

“They didn’t want to be bothered,” Beasley said of his congregation, most of whom were former Detroiters. “They’d been through all that in the Detroit area, like getting robbed. A lot of people are sitting up in churches, but they’re not understanding the concept that you’re not there just for someone to steadily preach to you. You’re there to go out and reach others. And we can’t leave out people that really need the help.”

And so it came to pass that only a dozen congregants remained. And the 12 were with him as he came to Detroit to cast out the devil.

Deliverance ministries believe that social ills like drug addiction and criminal behavior are caused by demons and evil spirits. The movement grew from Charismatic denominations like Pentecostalism in the 1960s. Followers believe that the supernatural is a part of daily life; that believers can be filled with the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues, cure the sick and drive away demons, based largely on a verse in Matthew that says Jesus gave his disciples the power to cast out unclean spirits and heal the possessed.

"When you start talking about demons, folk get like, 'I don’t want to hear that,' " Beasley said. "But you can't talk about angels without talking about demons. You believe in angels you gotta believe in fallen angels, 'cause there were. And their job is to get you to hell."

The practice of deliverance, as it’s called, is similar to the Catholic rite of exorcism, but without the strict ritual involved. Anyone trained in a Deliverance church, its members say, can free another person from the snare of the devil, often during dramatic church services.

Beasley believes Satan finds fertile ground in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods, where, he says, the devil fosters self-destructive behaviors — the sins of the fathers, as the saying goes — that are passed down through generations, trapping people in a cycle of crime and poverty and misery. The chain, he says, needs to be broken on a spiritual level.

“Here, you got to battle with that,” he said. “You’re dealing with the same type of people that have the same demons; now they got this too because they were raised by Pookie and Ray-Ray and all of them; you know, they were with grandma and grandpa gangster ghetto, and that’s what they were raised by. So now they are that, their children are that, their children’s children are that. So now you got a community full of that.”

One night, Beasley had a dream, in which a man led him through a huge building with long corridors and an auditorium filled with rows of seats. The man asked him whether he wanted to buy the building and make it his church. Not long after the dream, Beasley heard the voice of God telling him to put his belongings into storage and await further instructions from on high.

“Imagine sitting in my empty apartment, and I’m like, ‘Are you sure?’ Later that evening, I heard the Lord say, ‘Leave. Get in your vehicle and leave. I’ll direct you.’ So I’m thinking he’s getting ready to take me to a house in Bloomfield, he’s getting ready to do a miraculous thing,” Beasley said. “Where we were led was Detroit.”

He moved with his wife and daughter to his late mother’s modest old house near Joy and Southfield roads, in the neighborhood where he was raised.

They began to cast about for a new church building and found a nearby high school for sale, S. James Herman School, built in 1944 to teach the kids of the newly built Herman Gardens housing project. It was 177,000 square feet with a gym, an auditorium and 130 empty classrooms that still had desks and supplies in them. Once he walked its halls, he realized it was the exact place he saw in his dream. It was meant to be.

“I’m a person, when I dream dreams, they happen,” Beasley said.

They got the whole school for about $280,000.

Now his vision grew grander. He pictured filling the empty rooms with vocational classes for the community — culinary courses, graphic design classes, a truck-driving school and a 24-hour Christian bookstore and coffee shop — “I even went out and bought the espresso machine,” Beasley said. To him, this place would be the center of the neighborhood’s rebirth, based on an example he’d seen elsewhere.

“Let me put it to you this way — what Dan Gilbert is doing downtown — he’s doing a lot down there, employment and training and all of that — that’s what I wanted to do here, because everyone says everybody leaves out the community,” Beasley explained. “My whole focus has been to set up training in the building to kind of help bring the young fellas from the carjackings and killings and drug dealing. You gotta offer them something. You gotta have something for them.”

But unlike downtown, where billionaire Dan Gilbert’s considerable investments have brought thousands of new residents, dozens of building renovations and hundreds of security guards to downtown Detroit, the church’s neighborhood is far from those improvements, both in distance and progress.

One street to the east of the church, almost every house is a fortress with iron bars on the doors and windows. Two streets to the east, almost every house is gone. To the north, new low-income housing was built on the site of the old housing project surrounding the church, but that just gave the area’s poor people somewhere new to live in the same poor neighborhood. Unlike downtown, they’ve seen no new jobs, no new residents, few new developments.

And into this void stepped the church.

“We came here, we knew what we were dealing with,” Beasley said. “We knew this is the ‘hood. We knew what we came to build, we didn’t expect this to this degree.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he sat in the dark, hot school.

“But hey, it’s the ‘hood. Things happen.”

A prison of his own making

Then came the devil, as a thief in the night. Over the course of three years and 20 break-ins, scrappers have taken thousands of dollars worth of copper pipes from the boiler room, and copper wires from the maintenance tunnels that circle the school’s perimeter, and the copper in the now-smashed porcelain restroom sinks — and even an electric meter outside.

Each time, church members tried to figure out how the thieves got in and sought ways to keep them out. They put boards on the outside of the windows and screwed the window frames shut on the inside, and they looped chains through holes they drilled through steel doors, and they further secured some doors with braces, boards and extra locks.

And after all that work, the former prison guard now finds himself inside a prison of his own making, a fortress against the neighborhood he came to help.

“We feel like we’re building a fort,” Beasley said. “As it stands now, that’s exactly what we’ve got. Everything has to be locked. I mean, everything. And it’s really pathetic it has to be that way.”

After the first wave of thefts began in 2015, there was a lull for about a year. Members of the church paid thousands of dollars to replace all the stolen copper. But this year the break-ins began anew, and the dwindling, long-suffering congregation is faced with another high bill for repairs that might not be worth paying for twice.

Detroit Police spokesperson Nicole Kirkwood confirmed that numerous burglary reports have been filed with the police by the congregation. She said extra patrols have been made around the church in response. But there have been no arrests, no leads.

“It is frustrating,” she said. “He doesn’t have a security camera or an alarm. We’ve worked with them to try to provide a security plan and try to give them special attention.”

But Elder Nathaniel Benson pointed to several cameras, motion sensors and alarms throughout the school. The problem is, they need electricity to operate.

Benson shuffled through a dark corridor toward an electrical panel and shined a light on the wall. Several snipped wires poked outward in the darkness, but a few remained intact. Whoever came in here knew not only how to shut off the power so they could safely take the wiring, but also knew exactly which few wires to leave on to avoid getting caught.

“They left enough stuff in here so the hall lights will come on, and the outside lights will come on,” Benson said. “That’ll keep them from drawing attention. If the lights stay on out there they can come in here and probably work as long as they want to. If they kill them lights outside, somebody gonna come by, see the lights out, and say something’s wrong.”

Benson, 66, has had a rough life of crime and drugs. “I walked on the other side of the street for the majority of my life,” he said. “’Rob, steal, kill’ — that was our motto, me and my partner.”

Twenty-five years ago, he attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings and got a room in which to stay at a Midtown homeless shelter, which is where he met Beasley, who had stopped by one day to counsel homeless people there. Benson was so inspired that he joined the church. Beasley took him into his own home, where he still lives.

The devil is trying to stop this congregation from doing their work, Benson said, because the immanent success of this church meant the coming end of Satan’s hold on this neighborhood.

“When the devil gets busy, the breakthrough is at the door,” Benson said. “And he’s trying to keep it from happening. That’s something I can remember way back — a preacher saying you can go out there and do whatever you want to do, everything will seem like peaches and cream, and the devil’s going to start throwing a monkey wrench at you. And he’s gonna throw it hard.”

The congregation used to have a candy store in the school — the Sweet Jesus Candy Shop — which doubled as a refuge for the neighborhood’s children. “The parents, if something happened, would tell them to go to the candy store and wait there,” Beasley said. “Literally, kids that were getting ready to get robbed found their way here to this place, and they knew they were safe with my elders.” But thieves broke in and stole all the candy, thousands of dollars worth. That ended the candy store.

The church also operated a restaurant in the building — Heaven’s Kitchen — along with a catering business. But after scrappers stole the electric wiring, the walk-in freezer where they kept all the food doesn’t work anymore. That ended the restaurant.

They opened the school’s gym to the public for basketball games, provided space for the Eat Up Meet Up breakfast and lunch program offered by the United Way for Southeast Michigan, and hosted the Grow Detroit’s Young Talent summer jobs program. But then the building lost power and water, and that ended those programs.

The thefts and damage aren’t covered by insurance. The church started a GoFundMe page after the first round of break-ins, but it garnered only $335. One of their only sources of money now is selling food at monthly pit bull shows at the Wayne County Fairgrounds, a gig they got when a man pulled up to the portable grill they’d set up at the gas station on the corner of Joy Road and Southfield where they sold rib tips and hot dogs to make ends meet. The man was so impressed with their cooking that he invited them to serve their food at the dog shows.

Otherwise, they rely on contributions from church members. But there aren’t many left. “We lost a lot of people,” Beasley said. “People don’t want to keep trying to rebuild. Folk just got tired. They figure why keep fighting a losing battle?”

Waiting for a miracle

When the day of services came, they were all together in one place — in the musty school auditorium whose only light came in through the windows.

There were nine of them there — the core of the remaining congregation — sustained solely by boundless faith in their mission, saying their prayers in a powerless building, which has been surrounded by knee-high grasses and wildflowers ever since the wheel on their one lawnmower broke. It all was a far cry from the vision of a thriving church helping a grateful neighborhood.

Yet, they still hadn’t given up hope. Beasley took the stage in a long, red robe, and a prayer that was almost a pep talk to the remaining faithful.

“No matter what has taken place, the Bible tells us that we are to praise the Lord,” he said loudly. He had to shout because thieves stole the church’s PA system. “We’re not sorrowful. I’m not sorrowful. The Bible says make a joyful noise!”

And the congregation began to sing a song and clap their hands and bang on tambourines as the apostle pounded a beat on the lectern with the palm of his hand. People prayed so hard and fast that some began speaking in tongues, and they did so for an hour and a half.

The loudest of them all was Elder Kim Moss, who joined the church 10 years ago. She stood next to her walker, which had a large, open Bible resting on its seat.

“This church has taught me how to love, how to be strong,” she said, her voice quivering as she spoke of the apostle on stage. She’s one of the last, loyal church members who isn’t part of the family. “I lost my daughter. I was a bad wife … and I didn’t do a lot of things right. But he didn’t give up hope on me.”

Outside, the congregation had placed a sign on the door, which read “This is a church you are stealing from! If you do not stop, you are putting a curse on yourself and your family!” Nothing else has kept the thieves out so far. Maybe the fear of the supernatural just might.

There would be no services the following weekend. The congregation had to cook for another dog show at the fairgrounds, to earn a little money to keep their church alive until a miracle happens that allows them to stay in the neighborhood, which the devil isn't giving up without a fight.

“I’m not hearing God say to go,” Beasley said. “But at this point it’s gonna take him providing for what’s needed to stay, ‘cause I don’t have it anymore. I did that once already. But I would like to ‘cause it’s an issue of just because stuff happens, we don’t give up when it comes to people’s souls. It’s worth going through some things for that.”

John Carlisle writes about people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep