Did you know that Detroit has a psychedelic mushroom church?
In 2021 Detroit voters approved Proposal E, which decriminalized entheogenic plants and fungi in the city. Detroit’s Per Ankh Entheogenic Church is a non-denominational house of worship that incorporates psilocybin mushrooms and cannabis into its service.
On Sunday, it will host Kendis Gibson, an Emmy-winning journalist who details his personal journey using psilocybin to treat depression in his recent memoir Five Trips: An Investigative Journey into Mental Health, Psychedelic Healing, and Saving a Life.
Though the church building has been operating for about a year, according to the Per Ankh founder and director Moudou Baqui the movement behind it in Detroit goes back many years.
“We operate under the definition that the church is a body of people,” Baqui says. “So we’ve been operating as a body for about 15 or more years. We’ve been at this location for around a year now.”
Entheogenic churches have been a hot-button issue in Detroit in recent years. In 2023, Soul Tribes International, another entheogenic church that billed itself as Michigan’s first, was raided by Detroit police. While Proposal E and federal laws protect the use of entheogenic substances for cultural purposes, the city accused Soul Tribes of “poorly masquerading as a church” and being “a distribution center for unlawful controlled substances.” Soul Tribes has sued the city for what they say is infringement on their rights.
Last year, Detroit police raided the Psychedelic Healing Shack on Woodward Avenue for selling mushrooms and cannabis.
Proposal E decriminalizes possession and use of entheogenic substances, but that does not make it legal to sell them. Baqui says Per Ankh has not had any issues with the police.
“From my understanding and position, there are churches out there that are more focused on getting people in the door to buy the sacrament … it’s a little crass,” he says. “It’s a capitalist world and people are going to try to capitalize on whatever they can exploit. But we try to differentiate ourselves from that.”
He adds, “We’re not just an extraction point. We actually serve the community … Our purpose was to help, elevate, uplift, and educate.”
Baqui says Per Ankh offers cultivation classes, a laboratory to test mushrooms for potency, harm reduction and addiction counseling, trauma therapy, and other events, like the Q&A with Gibson this weekend.
“We like to distinguish ourselves by being consistent in being here for the community,” Baqui says, adding, “I just feel that the difference comes down to human issues.”
The movement behind Per Ankh goes back to Kilindi Iyi, a community leader and advocate of entheogenic substances who launched the Detroit Psychedelic Conference. He died in 2020 of COVID-19.
Baqui says he was first introduced to Iyi as a martial arts student. To Iyi, entheogens were a part of his martial arts training, Baqui says.
“My orientation was an extension of martial arts and other life sciences like breathing, eating, fasting,” Baqui says. “This was an extension of my development into advanced forms of the martial arts. At that level, we’re taught to master our energies, similar to Asian systems when it comes to mastering qi [the life force central to traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine], centering the mind, and not getting caught up in the illusions of the mind, the phantoms of the mind.”
Baqui continues, “So we began to learn about that as an aspect of our martial arts training, to enter into those liminal spaces and actually face factions of the mind, of the spirit, and the heart. You work toward vanquishing or conquering them, or at least making peace with them.”
Baqui says he immediately saw the benefits of using psilocybin mushrooms for meditation as part of Iyi’s martial arts studies.
“It began making amazing changes in our lives,” he says. “As fathers, brothers, sons, we began to become just better people. So then, you know, we felt this real need to share this with a larger community, because other people could be helped.”
He adds, “We just started building this beautiful community of psychonauts.”
In his own life, Baqui says psilocybin has helped him gain a different perspective and see things with better clarity.
“It’s allowed me to disabuse myself of political myths and cultural myths … you know, that ‘we go to war for freedom,’ that fake ass shit. It took the veil off my eyes,” he says, adding, “It relaxed any anxieties I had around the economy. As Americans , we are taught we are just one good decision away from being a millionaire. You relax into ideas like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be a millionaire. Maybe I just want a happy life.’”
Baqui says psilocybin has also helped him heal from racism.
“It allowed me to actually come across good-hearted principled comrades and friends in the white community, which I can tell you, I thought that was impossible,” he says.
These sentiments are echoed in Gibson’s book Five Trips, where he writes about how psychedelics helped him heal from “deeply entrenched racism” in his career as a national reporter for news organizations like ABC, as well as come to terms with his own sexuality.
Baqui says it was Per Ankh who reached out to Gibson to make the connection.
“He was impressed by our existence,” Baqui says, adding, “There’s not many Black voices in the psychedelic space, especially coming from the ‘professional’ realm. So there’s sort of a mutual admiration.”
On Sunday, Baqui says attendees can expect a candid conversation with Gibson.
“We’re going to try to create an environment where he feels at home and break the formalities and allow him to tell his story,” Baqui says.
Baqui adds that guests will also have the opportunity to learn more about Per Ankh and the possibilities of entheogens.
He says, “It’s the gift that keeps giving.”
From 5-8:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 27; Per Ankh Entheogenic Church, 15605 Woodrow Wilson St., Detroit; perankh1.org. Cover is a $25 donation.
This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 5, 2025.