Nearly two decades after ground was broken, Detroit's Perfecting Church says the sprawling sanctuary it has been trying to build at 7 Mile and Woodward is finally on track to wrap up construction by the end of 2026. The project, now in roughly its 23rd month of active building under a court-ordered timeline, includes a main sanctuary designed to seat more than 3,000 people, a separate 500-seat chapel, and a 400-seat amphitheater out front.
Bishop Marvin Winans, who leads the church and first announced the development more than 20 years ago, told ClickOnDetroit that the church started the project over two decades ago and that the building will ultimately be an asset to the city. Damon Tooles, president of Tooles Contracting Group, the firm handling the build, said the project is on the line to completion and that its biggest challenges have largely been met, according to the same report.
The scale of what is going up on the roughly 16-acre site is considerable: a building of nearly 170,000 square feet, large executive spaces, Sunday school rooms, massive parking lots, a grand staircase, and a newly installed water retention system required after stormwater rules changed sometime during the project's long timeline, ClickOnDetroit reports. Construction was originally supposed to take just 18 months.
A Vision That Dates Back More Than Two Decades
Winans first unveiled the plan at the site in 2003, at the time envisioning a $60 million campus that would include 70 townhouses, a 165,000-square-foot church seating 4,000, an 1,100-space parking garage, and a conversion of the existing church building into a performing arts center, all within three years, according to Deadline Detroit. That timeline collapsed well before it could be tested. Construction on the current version of the project stopped during the 2008 financial crisis, and the church says it maintained its faith through that stretch even as the site sat idle for years.
Winans said the church plans to keep working, believing God and inspiring its people, per ClickOnDetroit's report. The congregation has continued to hold regular worship services throughout the delays at its longtime facility on East Nevada Avenue near Van Dyke Avenue in East Detroit, according to a Facebook post from the church.
The Lawsuit That Forced a Deadline
The years of inactivity eventually drew legal action from the city. Detroit Corporation Counsel Conrad Mallett filed a public nuisance lawsuit against the church in February 2023, after sending a January 2023 demand letter, noting in court filings that no new building permits had been issued for the Woodward Avenue property since 2015, according to CBS News Detroit. Before the two sides settled, the church countersued the city in March 2023, alleging violations of Michigan's Freedom of Information Act and claiming officials had withheld public records showing the church was actively working to resume construction, per CBS News Detroit's earlier coverage of the dispute.
The lawsuit was ultimately dropped after Detroit and Perfecting Church reached an agreement replacing the litigation with specific construction goals and a required timeline. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Patricia P. Fresard signed a Stipulated Order of Dismissal in June 2023, with the church agreeing to submit a structural engineer's report, apply for permits by October 2023, and close on financing, according to The Michigan Chronicle. That court-mandated framework is what put the project on its current, monitored path toward completion.
A Track Record of Shifting Deadlines
Even with a court order in place, the church's completion estimates have moved before. In August 2024, Perfecting Church CEO Cindy Flowers said building was expected to restart that October with a projected finish by March 2026, according to The Mirror US. That March 2026 target has since slipped to the end-of-year window the church is now citing.
The city and the church have also found ways to work together outside the courtroom. In November 2024, the Detroit City Council approved a land swap sending 64 city-owned parcels to Perfecting Church in exchange for 39 church-owned parcels the city needed for municipal solar energy fields, with no money changing hands, according to BridgeDetroit. City officials valued the parcels going to the church at between $140,000 and $160,000, compared with $95,000 for the land the church gave up, prompting the deal's lone dissenting vote from Council President Pro Tem James Tate Jr., who raised concerns about the lack of concrete development plans for the newly acquired land, per the same BridgeDetroit report.
Scrutiny of Church Fundraising
Winans, a Grammy-winning gospel artist who co-founded the group The Winans in Detroit and won a 1985 Grammy for Best Male Soul Gospel Performance along with four other Grammys as part of the quartet, has a national profile that has occasionally intersected with controversy at home. In October 2025, he drew public criticism and viral online debate after a church livestream showed him criticizing a parishioner during a Day of Giving service for donating $1,235 instead of $2,000, as reported by The Independent.
For now, the church says the focus is on finishing the physical building. Grand opening details remain in the planning stages, and no firm date has been set for when the doors at 7 Mile and Woodward will officially open to the public.
