Kalamazoo Valley Family Church (Cathedral Church of Christ the King)

The former Cathedral Church of Christ the King, once the seat of the Bishop of the Diocese of Western Michigan, commands notice from its high position on a thirty-acre park off I-94. Sixteen brick piers, or spiky towers, one of which held a forty-seven-bell carillon, project upward from the red brick cube. The church's central plan is organized around a circular altar on a raised dais of poured concrete. The exterior walls of the steel-framed and poured-concrete church are of red brick and colored glass. The influence of Louis Kahn is especially striking, recalling, for example, his Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania. The church complex consists of the church space, a three-hundred-seat undercroft, administrative offices, classrooms, a library, and conference rooms. Originally the cathedral was intended to be the centerpiece of a complex that would include an academy and senior residence, but the cathedral became a drain on the financial resources of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Michigan. In 2005 the diocese deconsecrated the cathedral, and in 2007, sold it to Kalamazoo Valley Family Church, an independent, nondenominational, full gospel church.