The Good Shepherd congregation, on Perkins at the city’s border with Buena Vista, has returned to Church of God in Christ status, and Pastor Tony Monroe was embraced by COGIC leaders during a recent ceremony.
Singing and praising and testimonials reigned, and the tributes also mentioned Supt. Theodore Monroe, the founding pastor in 1968, who was 82 years old when he died in October 2014, six months after his wife, Neva, had passed away.
Tony Monroe has followed his father’s path since childhood, even when it wasn’t easy.
“Mom and Dad would have us in church on Sunday mornings, and also Sunday nights,” he recalls, as the seventh of their 11 children. “Then Tuesday nights and Friday nights, all of us would sit around a table at home (Fourth and Norman) for Bible study.”
His older siblings already were at Saginaw High School, where he would graduate in 1980. The enthusiastic new basketball coach, Charlie Coles, visited the home on Fourth at Norman in a quest to recruit two older brothers who more closely shared his father’s tall stature. But that proved to be a fruitless pursuit, because basketball nights also were Tuesday and Fridays, and the sessions to explore the Word of God came first.
Not that teenage Tony minded the restrictions.
“When I was 16 years old, the desire to preach took hold,” he says.
But he knew he also had to make a living, in the same way his father labored for nearly all of his adult life in the steamy insides of the GM Malleable Iron Plant, across town in the southwest section. One of the reasons for Supt. Monroe to be so strict was that he wanted his offspring to find work conditions that were not so hot and dirty.
Tony found an opportunity in Shreveport as a grocery store manager. At the same time he discovered a home at a Louisiana church where he was designated the minister of music, adopting his second moniker of “Maestro Monroe” as a pastor who takes his turn on the keyboard.
He returned home in 2006 to assist his father during the final years, after a fire required a Good Shepherd rebuild on Perkins street. Meanwhile, he has remained in what he describes as the “grocery business” as late shift manager of the Save A Lot near the courthouse on North Michigan.
“I’m pretty much the same as my father,” notes Pastor Tony Monroe, with a soft laugh, “except I won’t keep you in church all day. We begin at 11:30 on Sundays, and we by and large are out by 1 o’clock. Of course, anyone is welcome.”
The address is 3020 Perkins, two blocks east of the Saginaw County CAC near the Henry Doerr Child Development Center.
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