File:Greater Royal Worship Center - fmr Christ German Evangelical Church - Buffalo, New York - 20210713.jpg

English: The Greater Royal Worship Center, 1335 Clinton Street at Baitz Avenue, Buffalo, New York, July 2021. This stout Gothic Revival edifice is an early work of Buffalo architect August E. Minks, whose output would proliferate across the East Side in the following decades, and - despite a fire that gutted the building in 1923, the removal of the imposing spire atop the west tower some years later, and the unusual covering of the original brick exterior with wooden shingles - is indeed one of the best preserved of Buffalo's old German-American churches. As usual, pointed arches are plentiful: atop the portals in the triple entrance, crowning the pairs and quintets of small windows on the façade, and projecting from the gable, with a rose window enclosed within. Inside, the second-floor auditorium is highlighted by a stained-glass rondo of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Christ Evangelical Church was founded in 1899 as one of the first congregations in the German-American enclave that was newly coalescing around the corner of Clinton Street and Bailey Avenue; their church building was dedicated on Christmas Eve of that year and, unusually among local congregations at the time, was never replaced or expanded. Services, originally held in German, became bilingual in 1908 and were held exclusively in English beginning in 1942. The congregation dissolved in 2009 - by which time a series of denominational mergers left it with the somewhat unwieldy name Christ United Church of Christ - and the building was bought the following year by Royal Church of God in Christ.