“So this is your office?” I ask.
“I cleaned it up,” she says. “Can you smell the Pledge?”
I glance around a nearly empty room, just bookcases, a desk, a picture of Jesus.
“Is your home like this, too?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Except for the Pledge.”
Faith Fowler, 55, is not your typical pastor. She is funnier. And more blunt. And, Lord, does she get things done. Tireless, humble, with a shock of white-blonde hair and a cackling laugh that sounds like a parrot being roasted, she houses people, feeds people and has created 85 full-time jobs for once-struggling Detroiters who now, among other things, turn old tires into sandals.
She is the most important currency of our city, a loving, egoless, inspiring leader who doesn’t see color, doesn’t see class, who looks at our poorest, most neglected citizens and sees only hope and opportunity.
And humor.
Twenty years ago, on her first day on the pulpit at Cass Community United Methodist Church in Midtown, she prepared a sermon and delivered it with passion — until an older woman in the back interrupted her with a scream.
“Hey, lady! We’re out of toilet paper!”
It’s been only up from there.
The need for jobs in the city
She is often the only white face at the funerals she officiates or the church groups she addresses. It doesn’t faze her. Despite being called Faith (“someone once asked if that was my stage name,” she says), Fowler had to push her way to the pulpit. She grew up in Detroit and Royal Oak, the daughter of teachers, and when she was 13, she shyly told her youth pastor she felt destined to become a minister.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said.
She became one anyhow. You can’t talk Faith out of anything. She ignored people warning her to stay out of inner-city Detroit, to stay away from the poor, the addicted, the developmentally disabled.
Instead, she embraced them all. She offered them dignity. She started a culinary arts program, a warming center. She created a Miss Cass pageant after being told that many of her challenged congregants never had a milestone to be proud of.
Eight years after coming to the church, she founded Cass Community Social Services, which has blossomed into one of Detroit’s most effective and original charitable agencies — creating everything from apartment buildings for transitional clients to a green warehouse turning the city’s garbage into retail products, from floor mats to sandals that are selling, online, around the world.
“Just seeing how happy the people are who have jobs, that’s the best part,” she says. “We actually got some criticism, because when we bought the warehouse, people wanted to help us hand out furniture and clothes and stuff.
“But then I said we’re gonna switch to jobs. And people got mad. ‘What do you mean you won’t take my sofa? What do you mean you won’t take our rummage sale stuff?’
“Well, to be honest, I can get that stuff for them in a lot of places. What I can’t get them is a job.”
A chance to help her mission
Fowler inspires. She employs. And now she has written a book, “This Far By Faith” (David Crumm Media, $20). Not to crack the best-sellers list. But to do what she always does: raise money and awareness for her community. The chapters are far less about the reverend than the assorted people she has dealt with over 20 years.
The thing is, the book is great. Funny. Insightful. Heart-wrenching. At 1 p.m. Saturday, at Orchestra Hall, that book will be given to all attendees at a launch party that is so atypical of this woman, it’s worth going just to see her embarrassment.
But it’s worth it for another reason: to realize how many good people in Detroit labor every day, without attention, without regard to race, status — sometimes even safety — to lift up the neediest. When she speaks around the state, Fowler points out that rural areas have poverty and addiction, that other cities have crime and homelessness. It takes the stigma off of Detroit.
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