The stone the builders rejected.
Psalm 118:22 is carved into the cornerstone we laid in 2008. It is the story of this building, and the story of the people who filled it.
Three chapters, one city block, and a church that refused to leave.
Church in the City has only ever had two homes, and they sit two blocks apart on the east side of Denver. The first was a grocery store nobody wanted. The second was a synagogue nobody could save. Both were given to a congregation whose mission from day one has been to grow the saved, save the lost, and care for the downtrodden, and whose motto from the first newsletter to the last has been four words: To God be the Glory.
What follows is drawn from the church’s own records, the Denver Post, Westword, the Intermountain Jewish News, History Colorado and Historic Denver.
A synagogue on 16th and Gaylord
Beth HaMedrosh Hagodol, “the Great House of Learning,” is founded in rented rooms above a shoe store on Larimer Street. It will grow into Denver’s largest Orthodox congregation, led for more than fifty years by Rabbi Charles Kauvar.
On Rosh Hashanah, the cornerstone is laid at 16th Avenue and Gaylord Street. A former governor and Judge Ben Lindsey attend. The congregation’s Hebrew name is carved across the entrance cornice, where it still reads today.
The building is dedicated: a 1,500-seat double-height sanctuary in the Classical Revival style, with stained glass, stenciled ceilings, and terra cotta menorahs and Stars of David set into the brick. For 48 years it is the spiritual center of Jewish life on Denver’s east side.
The congregation moves to a new synagogue on South Monaco Parkway. The building on Gaylord passes through forty years of other hands: the Denver Indian Center, an Irish cultural center, a Jazzercise hall, a failed events center, failed condo and loft conversions. By 2007 the roof leaks, the windows are broken, and pigeons have the sanctuary.
A church is born in a grocery store
Michael Walker, born Jewish in the Bronx, the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, arrives in Denver a decade after coming to faith in Yeshua. He and his wife Brenda spend the next years driving in from Arvada to coffeehouses, shelters and rehab centers. By 1987 a handful of committed people are running a weekly outreach to a homeless shelter.
“It’s time to unpack your bags in the city.”
The call Pastor Walker describes receiving, Westword, 2020
Walker notices a boarded-up 1963 Safeway at Colfax and Josephine, one block from East High School. Inside: broken glass, old tires, trash, and a veterans’ thrift store that gladly shares the space. On November 10, 1991, Church in the City opens its doors and signs a twenty-year lease.
The early years are hard. “When we started out, the violence was crazy,” Walker later tells Westword. The church reaches out to gangs, feeds the homeless in its parking lot every week with a sound truck and amplified worship, and shares its building with three other congregations.
The ministries that still define the church take root in the Safeway: a food bank, a Wednesday night meal for 200 homeless neighbors, Celebrate Recovery, a free nurse-practitioner clinic with St. Joseph Hospital, Whiz Kids tutoring, the Barth Hotel service for low-income seniors (since 1998), the Barn-A-Bus prison ministry to eight Colorado facilities (since 1998), teen-parent mentoring, a Spanish-language congregation, and a youth room the kids named the Angel’s Den.
By 2008 the congregation numbers about 800 and the Denver Post calls it possibly “one of the most diverse, ethnically and financially, in Colorado.”
A Friday Erev Shabbat service begins, with a “Torah Club” for the children. The Jewish roots of the church, and of its pastor, become part of its public identity years before it ever sets foot in a synagogue.
A church moves into a synagogue
The Safeway block is slated for redevelopment, and a deal is negotiated: Church in the City will give up its lease on Colfax and take on the derelict synagogue two blocks east at 16th and Gaylord. In January the Denver Post reports the move. Walker walks the sanctuary in a respirator and booties, past graffiti reading “Guarded by Lucifer,” and says, “Isn’t it beautiful.”
He names the restoration Project Nehemiah, after the man who rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls. The church closes on the building on Rosh Hashanah, September 2008, the same holy day on which the synagogue held its first service in 1921. The loan is approved two minutes before the market closes on the day the Dow drops 777 points.
On March 27, 2009, Church in the City – Beth Abraham is dedicated. The name honors the Bronx synagogue of Walker’s grandfather. The original congregation, now BMH-BJ, donates back the original pulpit and Torah table, and had saved the original stained glass, which Brenda Walker uses as the pattern for the new windows. A 1921 chandelier is rehung. 950 seats come from the Buell and Acoma theaters. A wall of Jerusalem stone goes up in the entry, and a Saturday Shabbat service begins: one congregation, two expressions.
“In the natural world, none of this could happen.”
Pastor Michael Walker, The Denver Post, March 27, 2009
History Colorado’s State Historical Fund awards $121,610 through Historic Denver to restore the exterior masonry and terra cotta to federal preservation standards. The building is a contributing landmark in Denver’s Wyman Historic District.
Vandals spray swastikas on the building. Every Denver station and the Denver Post cover it; The Forward covers it nationally. Walker’s answer: “We’re loving people here. We’re caring for the poor and the needy.” The man arrested had come to the church for help.
Westword profiles the church as “a greenhouse for numerous other church plants,” hosting twenty ministries and serving more than 28,000 meals a year. The same year the church hosts a free COVID testing clinic and the memorial for Isabella Thallas.
On December 3 the church marks two anniversaries at once: thirty years of Church in the City and one hundred years of the synagogue. The rhythms of the year carry on around it: the MLK Marade on Colfax every January, Passover and the fall feasts, the community holiday dinners.
After violence at East High School, the Angel Cafe opened inside the church as a safe off-campus lunch spot for students, with mentoring and jobs to follow. It was Pastor Walker’s idea. “If kids show up, we’re going to be here to support them.”
What thirty-five years looks like.
The story is still being written.
Thirty-five years on, the food bank still opens every week. Shabbat still begins at ten. The doors on Gaylord Street are still open to anyone who walks up the steps. The stone the builders rejected is still the cornerstone.