File:Dayspring Church of God of Prophecy - fmr Ascension Lutheran Church - Buffalo, New York - 20221219.jpg

English: Dayspring Church of God of Prophecy, 2628 Bailey Avenue at Dorris Avenue, Buffalo, New York, December 2022. Built in 1966 to a design by the locally-based architecture firm of Shelgren, Patterson & Marzec, the church's architecture draws from an interesting grab bag of stylistic influences: the simplified forms, preponderance of right angles, and repetitive fenestration pattern on the ground-floor side elevations represent Midcentury Modernism; the upper level smacks of the A-Frame aesthetic with its enormous, steeply sloping roof extending all the way to the base; Classical influences on the ground-floor façade such as pilaster strips and decorative corbeling hearken back to pre-Modern architecture. The building was originally home to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension, one of the earliest Protestant congregations to set up shop in the city's then-new Delavan-Bailey neighborhood: it traces its history back to the early 1910s, when a Canadian-born travelling pastor by the name of H. Beutler began to hold German-language services in various rented spaces around the area. The small wood-frame chapel they constructed in 1914 was augmented by a $45,000 addition in 1928 which comprised a parish house, parsonage, and small auditorium for church events. The planning for their replacement with the current building began in the 1940s, but proceeded slowly due to financial constraints. Ascension persevered through changing neighborhood demographics until 1996, when it dissolved and sold the building to the local branch of the Church of God of Prophecy, who relocated to the building from their former home in the Parkside area and remain there today.