St. Michael Church grows against the grain, expands on Summer Ave.
Tom Bailey
Daily Memphian
The construction permit filed this week for a $2 million office building might have been just another development had it been filed for some different address by some different applicant.
But St. Michael Catholic Church at 3863 Summer plans to erect a 5,800-square-foot parish office.
Which may be nothing short of extraordinary.
So many other Memphis churches are shrinking in membership, moving to smaller spaces, closing, selling their buildings or even watching as new owners demolish the old ornate structures.
For example, less than a mile west of St. Michael at 3476 Summer, Highland Heights United Methodist Church shrunk in membership and closed last year. A convenience-store operator bought the Gothic buildings, wants to tear them down, and build a gas station at the site.
A mile and a half to the east of St. Michael at 4649 Summer, Grimes Memorial United Methodist also shrunk in membership, and closed last year. Its buildings were razed and a Chick-fil-A is to be erected at the site.
Meanwhile, St. Michael is not only about to start building a parish office, it has already started a $200,000 project to build two additional soccer fields, a pavilion and outdoor restrooms.
“Father Ben has really grown the parish and is doing an incredible job,” Rebecca Conrad of ANF Architects said. She’s the principal in charge in designing the parish office project.
“I think it is a good story, about just what he’s been able to do over there.”
Since Father Benjamin “Ben” Bradshaw arrived about 2 1/2 years ago, St. Michael has drawn more and more families, especially from the Latino community.
The church counts 2,500 active families now.
The number of masses St. Michael celebrates each weekend has grown to seven, and an eighth will soon be added.
The religious education classes have 725 children enrolled.
About 75 youth are active in the youth group.
“I definitely think that for the Hispanic community over the last two or three years, we’ve seen exponential growth,” Father Ben told The Daily Memphian.
“Which is beautiful because it also means you have to have more infrastructure for ministries.”
The church’s ministries include classes for both English as a second language and Spanish as a second language, counseling, athletics, food distribution each Saturday by St. Vincent de Paul Food Pantry, and more.
He’s a Memphis Catholic High alum who had to re-take a Spanish language class after failing it the first time. Now, he speaks the language fluently and leads both English- and Spanish-language masses.
But Father Ben describes himself as “allergic” to any notion of “their” mass and “our” mass within the church.
Instead, he likens St. Michael Church as “two lungs breathing together.”
“I tell our parish, we don’t have two communities. We have one community with two languages,” he said.
The new parish office will replace the current one that is in such poor condition Father Ben worries about the safety of his staff.
The 69-year-old former convent building has holes at the roof line where squirrels come and go, a downstairs room where the ceiling is missing and an upstairs room where two temporary wood columns were built only to ensure the ceiling does not fall.
The building will be demolished; its footprint will be part of a larger surface parking lot near the southwest corner of the church’s 10 acres.
The new office will connect and extend east from the front of the church. The old church rectory will be razed to make room.
Father Ben likes that the new building’s appearance will mesh with the existing brick buildings. “It looks like it’s an organic fit,” he said, “not a square peg in a round hole.”
Conrad, the architect, said the new parish office will give the church an even bigger presence along Summer. “It’s a pretty significant church,” she said. “This just builds on their campus aesthetic.”
In later phases, Father Ben said, a new parish hall may extend south from the new parish office, creating a courtyard enwrapped by the main church building, new office and parish hall.
“God willing,” Father Ben said of a new parish hall. “... I would love it. And (Conrad’s) plans are outstanding. But a lot of it depends on how much we can raise.”
Meanwhile, construction is well underway on two new soccer fields for smaller children on the northeast corner of the church property, near Summer Avenue. They will augment two existing soccer fields for older youth immediately to the south.
Father Ben credits the new construction to “families who have really stepped up.”
“What’s interesting is to see the volume of people who have participated” in making contributions, he said. “It’s not just a few select donors. It’s people who have really stepped up, which is really cool to see.”
The fundraising has even been poetic.
The campaign to raise funds for a security fence was called “Cents for a Fence.”
The effort to raise $90,000 for new air-conditioning was dubbed “Prayer for the Air.”
