Our mission is to worship God, to follow Jesus Christ, to grow together in the Holy Spirit, and to serve the world.
On September 1, 2022 Fr. Daniel (Dan) Buchin entered into a Covenant Agreement with Holy Spirit Episcopal Church as Pries
t in Charge. We welcome Fr. Dan to lead Holy Spirit in both worship and outreach ministries. Fr. Dan’s years of experience in worship, outreach, and pastoral care, along with a strong desire to serve, are a blessing to Holy Spirit and to the broader community. In fall of 2024, Fr. Dan became the Rector for Holy Spirit.
Holy Spirit opened in May 2003 as a mission parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Michigan, in the former St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Sparta. The congregation was made up of families from St. Matthew’s, an Episcopal parish founded in 1955 in Sparta, and families from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids who volunteered to help start a new church plant. In 2018 we became a parish church under the guidance of our first rector, Mother Nurya Love Parish.
The Bishop provides us the certification of Parish status. November 3, 2018. Photo credit: Canon Katie Forsyth
Our congregation moved to its current location at the corners of Post and Pine Island drives in Belmont in 2005. Our building itself has a long history of service to the community. The building’s core is the old Post School, which served as a one-room schoolhouse from the 1880s until well into the 20th century. The building also has served as an administrative building for the Comstock Park school district, and at least one other church.
As we are reminded in Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” From 2008 to 2020 Holy Spirit housed and supported a program that helped young children who were struggling to meet grade level expectations in reading. The Explore and Soar Reading Club helped families by providing the program free of charge. On average, the students increased their reading level by 1.5 years. Unfortunately the pandemic made it impossible to continue, but we know that we were blessed to be able to help so many children.
Today, we are a healthy, stable, small and growing congregation. We come from different backgrounds, income levels, family structures, and religious viewpoints. Most of us, after visiting, stayed when we felt the warm and accepting atmosphere and experienced genuine worship. We found Holy Spirit to be a place in which exercising our skills was encouraged. We all come from someplace else, bringing a richness of diversity. Therefore, there is no division between the “old” and the “new” as we are all working together to grow and nurture the place we have been given.
The Episcopal Church is a part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, comprising 80 million members in 44 regional and national member churches in more than 160 countries.