Shorewood's legacy

I realize I quite possibly never would have been introduced to my church if it wasn’t for a story I did in 1991, working as a feature writer for the Naperville Sun newspaper.

My article was about a Naperville man who started an inner-city youth group inside Precious Blood Catholic Church on Congress Parkway right off the Eisenhower in what was, at the time, a slum-like and crime-ridden neighborhood on the near-West Side of Chicago.

The purpose of his club was to provide young boys and girls (ages 8-12) after-school sports activities where they would be safe, learning Christian values from volunteers who would act as mentors.

While I was not in any way interested in initiating anyone into Catholicism, especially myself, I saw his project as a way for me to become involved in a ministry and, through the Naperville man’s encouragement, I volunteered to be a board member of this brand-new endeavor.

The whole experience was pretty short-lived, but I do remember putting together a one-time newsletter I named “The Mustard Seed.”

My funniest memory is when I got Naperville’s Mayor George Pradel, a long-time beloved police officer I had become friends with, to play Santa Claus at the church for an evening Christmas party I helped put on for the kids. Pradel was actually visibly uncomfortable walking down the dark sidewalk with me in his Santa outfit as young men hanging out on the street made intimidating comments directed at the two of us.

Anyway, one of the board members who lived near the Italian restaurant strip on Taylor Street invited me to a block party. I didn’t know a soul at the party besides him, so he introduced me to his brother who, in turn, introduced me to his good friend, Daniel, who immediately proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions.

When Daniel learned I was a Bible-believing Christian, he said, and it’s the one thing about our meeting each other that Saturday afternoon that's stuck in my brain all these years, “I’ve got just the church for you.”

The next week he had me pick him up in my car outside his apartment on the North Side and directed me to the very edge of Chicago, near Harlem and Foster, for a Wednesday night study at Shorewood Bible Church.

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Here's an old piece I put together about the church:

Shorewood Bible Church spent 22 years on the western edge of Chicago before moving to Rolling Meadows and very few of its active members today go back to when the church was called North Shore and located on Sheridan Road in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.

“Some of us don’t have what we call 'institutional memory' as much as others of us do, but what I want you to appreciate is the fact Shorewood has a history, a legacy and a heritage," says Richard Jordan.

The assembly was founded in year 1900 and the minutes book from that year reveal the first regular services were held the first Sunday in 1900 in a vacant store on Evanston Avenue. The church building was erected in 1906. The service of dedications of the North Shore Congregational church building was March 31-April 21, 1907.

“Here’s a program from a Sunday School children’s day on June 11, 1911,” says Jordan. “That’s old stuff folks. They paid 95,000 for the corner and the old stone building they put on it that’s still there.”

In April of 1900 North Shore called a pastor, James Stewart Anslie from Fort Wayne. They had their first organizational meeting on May 6 of 1900 with 86 members. By the end of 1902, they had grown to a congregation of about 400 people. They first erected the side building and then the auditorium.

By 1910 they had the building completely paid for. “Here’s a list of the pastors and it’s fascinating there would be a book like this. We don’t do this kind of stuff very well anymore. They’ve got all the members, people added and how they came, profession of faith, people who were dismissed, the ones who died. All hand-done, beautiful handwriting.”

In the list of pastors was Stewart, then Paul Riley Allen in 1923. J.C. O’Hair was installed Sept. 1, 1923 and remained the pastor until his death in January of 1958. After him was C. R. Stam (1958-60), Kennedy Sloane (1960-63), Clarence Kramer (1964-71),  Ernest Green (1972-79) and Jordan since then.

“O’Hair and I are the only two who’ve pastored over three decades in the assembly,” says Jordan. “It was under O’Hair’s ministry that they built . . .  in fact, there’s a note here about the doing of that, but in October of 1923 the Sunday school was discarded and that’s when they moved out of the congregational denomination. In July 1924, O’Hair started radio broadcasting on WDBY (We Delight in Bothering You). The call letters were changed to WPCC (We Preach Christ Crucified) in Dec. 1, 1925.

“If you know something about the history of the grace movement, you know something about who Charles Baker was, he’s with the Lord now, but Mr. Baker came to work with Mr. O’Hair. He was a  graduate from Dallas Seminary and Mr. O’Hair hired him to build a radio transmitter that was in the bell tower on corner of Wilson and Sheridan. This was a major North Shore intersection at the time. There were tens of thousands of people who would go by the church, and if you go down there today there’s still the sign on top of the old bell tower, ‘Christ Died for Our Sins.’

Life Magazine in the ’50s took a picture off of the Wilson El station in Uptown looking toward the Lake and there’s that sign. That was a gospel witness to tens of thousands of people every day. But they started with the radio ministry and Mr. O’Hair wrote over 200 books and booklets. There was a saying back then, ‘Don’t make J.C. O’Hair mad at you; he’ll write a book about you.’ ”

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Here’s a good trivia question: Who was born only four years before General Douglas MacArthur in their same hometown of Little Rock, Ark.? The answer is J. C. O’Hair, born Dec. 31, 1876.

O’Hair, a one-time accountant, was in his late 20s when he became the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico! After returning to the U.S. he made a name for himself in the construction and lumber business and married a woman from Kansas named Ethel and had six kids together. In 1917 he entered into full-time evangelism and went around the country preaching and teaching. On Sept. 1, 1923 he was installed as a pastor of North Shore Church.