On a recent evening in Carriage Town, music filled the plaza beside Peoples Church of Flint. People gathered for a local band, conversation, and the pleasure of sharing a piece of the city together. They had not all come for worship. They did not need to share the same beliefs to share the space.
It was an ordinary scene in the best possible way and a glimpse of what this unusual Flint congregation is trying to become.
Peoples Church occupies a former automotive building at 503 Garland Street. Its industrial shape does not resemble a traditional sanctuary, but perhaps that is fitting. This is a congregation that has changed names, buildings, and denominational relationships while continuing to ask the same underlying question: Who has room here?
“The church is not a building. It’s the people,” said Dale Emery, a longtime member who has overseen building and property work. “The people are what make up the church. The building doesn’t make the church.”
The congregation’s history reaches back to First Baptist Church of Flint, established around 1853. It moved into its prominent East Court Street sanctuary in 1952 and adopted the name Woodside Church in 1961. After selling that property to Mott Community College, the congregation returned to Carriage Town, only blocks from one of its earliest homes. In 2022, it adopted the name Peoples Church.
Read simply as a timeline, those changes can sound administrative. Read as a series of choices, they reveal something more human: generation after generation deciding what should be preserved, what must change and who might still be standing outside.
Peoples Church has retained its Baptist roots while building relationships with the United Church of Christ, the Alliance of Baptists, and American Baptist Churches. Those affiliations hold different histories and traditions, but the congregation has not treated tradition as a set of conclusions frozen in time. It has used that inheritance to keep examining how faith should meet the world in front of it.
Its connection to Flint’s civil rights history deserves particular attention. University of Michigan-Flint archival records describe Woodside as an interdenominational, interracial congregation with a liberal social philosophy. Edgar B. Holt, a significant figure in Flint’s NAACP history, and his wife were members.
Inside the church hangs its Flag of Humanity, a symbol the congregation associates with generations of public action. Church memory connects it to Selma, Flint fair housing demonstrations, and, later, campaigns involving water, immigration, and economic justice. Researchers are still tracing the flag’s Selma history through contemporary records and firsthand accounts, but its meaning to the congregation is unmistakable: faith was never intended to remain inside the sanctuary.
That commitment has sometimes carried a cost.
In 2006, Woodside publicly affirmed the full inclusion of LGBTQ people. The North Area Baptist Association subsequently voted 18-3 to sever its relationship with the congregation. Woodside retained its Baptist identity and found other denominational relationships, but the decision marked a genuine institutional break.
For Emery, acceptance was not an abstract policy. Raised in the Lutheran church, he served as a lay minister but eventually felt that he could not live openly there as a gay man. When someone told him about Woodside, he discovered a congregation where he felt he could serve without concealing part of himself.
“I found out that I can be myself there,” he said.
For people who had been asked to hide part of themselves in order to belong, an openly affirming church represented more than a policy change. It offered the possibility that faith and identity did not have to exist in opposition.
That principle extended beyond any one community. During the Flint water crisis, Woodside administered more than $50,000 donated by congregations around the country to help residents facing delinquent bills, shutoffs, and property liens. The money was exhausted within weeks.
In 2020, the congregation adopted the Garland Declaration, connecting its faith to racial and economic justice, bodily autonomy, environmental responsibility, peace and the common good. It is an ambitious document. The more difficult question is how those values become visible in ordinary life.
Today, that work is happening with a much smaller congregation. Emery estimates that Peoples Church has fewer than 50 members, with approximately 35 to 40 people attending an average Sunday service. A relatively small group is caring for a building envisioned as a resource for a much larger community.
The move from East Court Street brought both freedom and sacrifice. The enormous former sanctuary carried architectural beauty, room, and generations of memories, but also maintenance and utility expenses built for a congregation of another era. Garland offered flexibility and a return to the city’s center, but it did not eliminate the practical cost of keeping community space alive.
There is no perfect building. A larger one offers more possibilities and larger bills. A smaller one offers financial breathing room but less space. Either way, somebody must unlock the doors, clean the rooms, repair what breaks, and remain after everyone else goes home.
The plaza provided an even harder lesson. It was created as an open gathering place, but unstructured use eventually produced safety concerns and complaints from neighbors. According to Emery, the congregation removed its furniture and spent approximately $12,000 on temporary security.
The decision was painful because closing an open space appeared to conflict with the church’s desire to welcome people. Yet a space cannot remain welcoming if the people using it, the surrounding neighborhood, and the facility itself cannot be kept safe.
Hospitality needs more than good intentions. It requires boundaries, resources, and shared responsibility.
The congregation has since explored organized ways to bring life back to the plaza. Local music, community events, independent artists, vendors, and civic outreach have all found room there through neighborhood cooperation. The significance is larger than any one event or business. It demonstrates what the property can become when responsibility does not fall on a handful of church members alone.
“You don’t have to be a member to be part of our church and to serve,” Emery said.
That may be the most important invitation Peoples Church can offer. It is not asking every person who enters to adopt identical theology, politics, or interpretations of history. It is asking whether people with different experiences can still make something useful, safe, and joyful together.
For church members, that work is an expression of faith. For someone arriving for music, a meeting, a volunteer project, or a community conversation, shared faith is not a price of admission.
Tensions are high far beyond the walls of this church. Americans have countless reasons to sort themselves into separate rooms, often before learning one another’s names. Peoples Church cannot solve that division by itself. What it can offer is a place to practice something different.
Its greatest inheritance may not be a particular building, name or symbol. It may be the willingness to keep making room and to keep asking who will help care for that room once it has been opened.
Near the corner of Garland and Second, a congregation with more than 170 years behind it is still becoming something new. Its name is not merely a description. It is an ongoing invitation: a church for the people, with the people, and sustained by the people.
Belonging is not something a building promises.
It is something people practice.
You can find more information about Peoples Church of Flint, including ways to support their mission, at peopleschurchofflint.org. Follow them on Facebook.
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