A Pastor Bought a Former Strip Club to Turn Into a Church. Can He 'Purify' Cleveland's Adult District?

Cove City Church opened up in the middle of the bulk of Cleveland’s strip club district on St. Clair Avenue. Credit: Mark Oprea

If Cleveland has a Sex District, it’s nestled around roughly ten blocks of St. Clair Avenue.

You have small-stage strip clubs like the Crazy Horse off East 14th, the pocket-sized Emperor’s on the edge of Historic Chinatown. There’s gay outposts like the Leather Stallion off East 22nd, the private cabanas at Flex Spas off East 26th. Your BYOB sex clubs awash in red neon and orchestral moaning, Club Eros and Club Escape, off East 38th. Your kink play parties and BDSM rope groups, near East 33rd, at the Cleveland Academy of Fetish Arts.

And there, right smack dab in the middle, is Pastor Josh Miller and his non-denominational Cove City Church.

For the past three years, Miller has operated a thriving ministry with a congregation of about 80 out of a black-and-beige-stucco building off East 24th and St. Clair that neighbors car detailers, a firefighter’s union, a former underground rave house and the Magic City Strip Club.

Cove City’s move to a neighborhood it doesn’t ostensibly seem to belong in is in no way a byproduct of chance or information withheld by a realtor. Miller, who relocated Cove City to St. Clair from Case Western’s campus during the pandemic, said he intentionally set up his ministry on a street apparently devoid of religiosity.

“Our vision has always been to go into places where churches don’t normally or won’t go to,” Miller, 41, told Scene, standing in Cove’s black-box auditorium space. “We weren’t interested in going to suburbia or going into a safe place.”

“We were more interested in focusing on, ‘Where’s the need? And where is God calling us?’”

A large and vacated Cleveland strip club, apparently.

Next door to Cove City’s current space at 2439 St. Clair is a gargantuan warehouse that used to house The Velvet Rope, a strip club that shuttered in 2015. In 2023, Miller raised some $125,000 to buy the building in a County Sheriff’s auction (on Good Friday), space that will help extend and fine-tune Cove’s greater mission: create coffee-shop jobs for area strippers that seek a life out of the industry.

Although Cove’s expansion will take years to achieve (Miller does construction work by day), the church is already laying groundwork for Miller’s attempt to purify St. Clair. Once a month, an outreach team—Cove’s “strip club ministry”—walks up and down the street, making their spiritual presence known to denizens of the Sex District.

Cove City Pastor Josh Miller bought the former Velvet Rope strip club next-door to convert it into a new auditorium. It will also host a café that will, Miller said, hire area strippers. Credit: Mark Oprea

Hannah Voss co-leads the so-called strip club ministry with RAHAB, an anti-sex trafficking group based in Canton. Every third Friday, Voss and her group knock on doors offering girls gift bags them in back rooms, where they’ll “hold hands and pray” with dancers before their shift.

“I’m not trying to get them out of the club personally,” Voss, who works as a therapist, told Scene. “I’m just trying to show them Jesus, and show them that there’s a person there to support them.”

Voss said she’s well aware of possible preachy overtones.

“You have girls that want nothing to do with you,” she said. “Then, you have those who, as soon as they see you, run up, give you a big hug, and say, ‘I’ve got so much to tell you!’”

Mack, a manager of Emperor’s Gentleman’s Club, smiled fondly when he was reminded of Cove City’s outreach.

“Oh, they come in here, oh yeah,” he told Scene, sitting at Emperor’s bar as two girls in pink lingerie danced on stage behind him. “They bring the girls goodie bags from Bath & Body Works. They love ’em.”

When asked if he felt Cove City was slyly trying to coax his staff into a possible transition to Miller’s coffee shop, Mack rubbed his chin.

“I never thought of that,” he said. “I don’t know. It’s weird.”

From a neighborhood perspective, Cove City fits into a narrative of Midtown and St. Clair-Superior slowly inching out of its identity as a ghost town industrial hub by day, illicit place-to-be by night.

It’s a narrative both private and public. Coffee shops, like the Green Coat Café, or new fleet of office space, like CrossCountry Mortgage office building, have popped up just south of St. Clair. Plans for two new cycle tracks to run close by have been pushed by City Hall.

In 2021, the St. Clair-Superior Development Corporation released a three-year plan highlighting its intention to reshape the area’s livability. It wanted to “increase accessibility and walkability.” To prop up “unique small businesses, entrepreneurs, manufacturers and ‘repurpose’-focused businesses.”

An identity Cove’s neighbors said they’re open to.

“When I found out it was a church, I thought, ‘Huh, that’s kind of weird,’” David Moore, who owns a car detailing business down the street, told Scene. “But getting to know Josh? I mean, I’ve been there. My mother’s been there. I had my dad’s funeral there. If you go on a Sunday—he fills that church. People love him.”

On a recent tour of Cove City, Miller spoke patiently about what a church could do in a place unfamiliar to it. There were toys to hand out to kids. An area out back where new believers are baptized.

Cove City Church’s current location Credit: Mark Oprea

And, of course, the space next door, where Miller foresees a bigger auditorium, a grander stage, that coffee shop run by those, he half joked, “in a different kind of service industry.”

He used Cove’s Merry Mart, the Christmas giveaway, as proof. “For us, it’s a visual,” he said. “It’s good visual and reminder of, like, this is a street now that is filled with hope and joy and love.”

“Not, you know,” he added, “all sorts of other activities.”

All that’s left, in Voss’ purview, is to choose a name for the café.

Two things came to mind: The Biblical tale of Rahab, a prostitute who rescued spies during the Battle of Jericho; and the strip club where, one day, Cove will discuss Rahab on a new stage.

“She was a prostitute who put a scarlet cord inside her window to be saved,” Voss said. “You had The Velvet Rope! And now we could call it The Scarlet Cord! How ironic would that be?”