Early Missionary Days

Grace Church was established in the 1870s as an offshoot of the Mission Sunday School of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church at Division and Pearl Streets. Sunday School, originally an Anglican innovation, was an important means by which the poor were served through education. 

Through this missionary initiative, Grace started in an inauspicious old wooden building at the corner of Wealthy Street and South Prospect. The building was appropriately a repurposed former elementary school. In the early 1870s, the intersection of Wealthy and South Prospect was on the outskirts of the city and only sparsely populated, mostly by the suburban poor. The Sisters of Mercy would later build the first St. Mary’s hospital in 1893, two blocks away. However, at that time, Grace was already an established presence in what was considered to be a mission field for working-class families.

Grace Church served the community as a mission school for the first several years of its existence. It started with eighty pupils and seven teachers, including the Rector of St. Marks, Samuel P. Earp. Within two years, Sunday School attendance had grown to 250, with a faculty of fifteen. In 1875, the mission was incorporated as the Grace Church Parish, with thirteen charter members. In the transition from an educational mission to a parish, Grace struggled. There were almost no homes south of Wealthy and only a few south of Cherry Street, so Grace Church needed to sustain itself in this sparsely populated, mostly poor, exurban location. 

It was a significant risk for the charter members of Grace Church to establish a parish. 

Growing into a Parish

Seth Chapin, the missioner appointed by St. Marks, served a few months as the first rector. William H. Knowlton, fresh out of seminary, then accepted the call to become its second rector. He cradled the parish, nursed it, and guided its early steps. Then, in 1875, as a sign of its growing maturity, St. Marks withdrew its sponsorship. By God’s grace, the fledgling parish stepped out on its own. By 1877, it managed to outgrow its decrepit former school house and purchased land at the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Cherry. This was a small brick chapel, constructed with a seating capacity of about two hundred. 

Fr. Knowlton remained rector of this little chapel until 1879. He was followed, then, by a succession of rectors, some serving for years and others only a few months. Grace, it seems, was a training ground for clergy, who often left for larger parishes. Yet somehow, the church managed to grow. Finally, in 1888, the parish called Dr. John B. Hubbs to be rector, who was described at the time as “very spiritually minded” and a man whose “sermons were of a high order.” Hubbs, an accomplished scholar, would later go on to be chair of the history department at Hobart College. Under his leadership, which lasted for a decade, the parish outgrew its chapel. 

Indicative of its growing prosperity, in 1892 a new church building of optimistic size was constructed, on the same site, with a seating capacity of 650. 

God’s Grace to Transform Challenging Times into Strength

Unfortunately, the building was completed just before the great financial panic of 1893, the most severe economic downturn prior to the Great Depression. The parish hunkered down and, with dedication and with God’s grace, they managed to meet their financial obligations. 

Along with fiscal hardship came decreased mobility, which increased hospitality, as people came together, bound by their common misfortune, a factor that strengthened the parish! In 1897, the economy recovered, and an era of rapid growth began. That same year, Dr. Hubbs left for St. Peter’s church in Geneva, New York, and Grace called R.H.F. Gairdner to be the new rector. 

Gairdner was an effective social organizer and built guilds, clubs, and associations, some of which remain today.

Changing Identity as the City Changed

As Grand Rapids expanded outwards, the demographics of the Wealthy Street corridor changed. The once rural community began to resemble more fully the economic status implied by the name of its main thoroughfare. In 1908, a new and “very commodious” rectory was built on Lafayette Avenue. This and other visible signs marked the slow gentrification of a formerly humble neighborhood. So too, the social composition of Grace evolved, in step with the community itself; its constituency shifted from the working-class poor to the prosperous middle and upper classes. The parish, now located in a wealthy suburb, accrued the reputation of an elite parish. 

Over the ensuing years, Grace Church both witnessed and represented the changing fortunes of its community through World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. Grace Church survived the upheavals of those several decades, serving its parish and the needs of a membership constantly in flux. By 1954, a campaign of urban renewal by the City of Grand Rapids necessitated a move east to the corner of Hall Street and Plymouth Avenue. This location, squarely in the middle of a residential neighborhood, provided room for expansion, on-site parking and easy accessibility. 

While not as gritty as the old site had become, the new location, on the southern border of prosperous East Grand Rapids, was nevertheless central to a demographically diverse community to the south and west.

Gerald R. Ford’s Parish

Grace Church has long been known as the home parish of President Gerald R. Ford. Mr. and Mrs. Ford were married in the old Grace Church sanctuary in 1948, which was after his service in the US Naval Reserve but just before his election to the US House of Representatives (1949) and eventual service as the United States’ thirty-eighth President. Grace Church, in 2006, was the site of President Ford’s private funeral. Grace Church remained the home parish of Betty Ford until her death in 2011.

The Fords were people of great accomplishment but humble demeanor, having exemplified the warm accessibility and strong moral character that Grace, as a parish, sought to represent to the broader community. 

In the Episcopal Church, and particularly at Grace, accessibility has been rooted in a theological commitment to hospitality, which is now given expression weekly, and quite literally, in the invitation extended to all baptized Christians, of whatever background, to join the parish at the altar for Holy Eucharist. 

The humble spirit of President Ford and his wife is emblematic of the historic tension at Grace between its location near a wealthy suburb and the reality of its socially and economically diverse membership.

Accessibility to the Historic, Broad Anglican Traditions

Through the second half of the twentieth century, Grace Episcopal Church became associated primarily with the “low church” beliefs and practices of the greater Anglican tradition. This may be related in part to the strong regional emphasis of the Calvinist and Reformed traditions that are so prevalent in West Michigan. 

To a greater degree, perhaps, Grace Church also reflected the ever-changing emphases of the larger Episcopal Church in America. Over the years, both the national church and Grace moved in the direction of the so-called “broad church” tradition, which represents a middle ground between Protestant/Evangelical sobriety and Anglo-Catholic mysticism. To some degree, Grace lagged behind in this movement but was nevertheless influenced by it. This is particularly so under the aegis of the current rector, The Rev. Dr. Stephen Holmgren, a scholar and expert liturgist. Nevertheless, changes in liturgical practice over the generations at Grace have been a matter of degree, not wholesale alteration.

Worship at Grace has always been centered on and related to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, in its various iterations. Over its existence, Grace has used four different editions: the 1789 version (when the congregation was established as a mission of St Marks) and subsequent revisions in 1892, 1928 and 1979. From its inception, and through the 1990’s, Grace alternated Sunday morning services between Holy Communion and Morning Prayer, reflecting practices typical of the Episcopal church at that time. 

For example, as Episcopalians began to rediscover the importance of the Eucharist to their corporate worship, in the latter part of the last century, it became common practice to celebrate Holy Communion every Sunday. By the late 1990s, Grace Church began to reflect this changing emphasis.

Now, Grace Church celebrates the Eucharist at its 10 a.m.Sunday services year-round, as well as on other occasions, depending on the liturgical season.

Grace Church Moving in the Present into the Future

Grace has reflected on its low-church history and recently embraced more fully the deep and ancient traditions of the church, particularly as those traditions are given expression through the liturgy. 

Grace has always attracted people who seek the middle ground between the so-called non-liturgical practices of many Protestant denominations and the high-church rituals of the Roman Catholic tradition. Anchored by history and practice, which sets finite limits on improvisation, Grace Church nevertheless continues to reflect prayerfully on the rich tradition of the past while looking for ways to innovate in the present and on into the future.

Today many individuals and families find themselves attracted to the Episcopal Church, where the liturgy and the altar, not the pulpit, is the focus of the Sunday morning service. This is not to say that preaching is given short shrift, on the contrary, it is given the same attention that is lavished on the proclamation of the Word in sermon-centric evangelical congregations. But the preaching of the Word is subordinated to the Holy Sacraments. 

It is the altar, not the pulpit, that is at the center of the chancel. Throughout its history, Grace Church, and the many generations of its parishioners, both living and dead, have been united through its corporate liturgy, which ties us to the past, present, and future. Holy history, therefore, has been given continuous expression at Grace through the Book of Common Prayer and the liturgy, formulations, creeds, vestments and architectural symbolism of the church. 

Our real history is found in the continuity we celebrate and affirm together in the sharing of the sacraments. 

We invite you to participate in that history too.