Inspiring hope through the proclamation of God's love, on television and    through other media. Maintaining our historic Christian faith in dialogue with and openness to    other faith traditions. Cooperating in ministry with like minded organizations. Encouraging spirituality in the business and professional community. Maintaining a strong financial base through careful stewardship.

Short Video documentary

We know it's an unusual name. It dates back to 1908, when our founders were looking for something to call the weekly ecumenical service they sponsored in Chicago's Orchestra Hall. It was in Chicago, it was on a Sunday Evening and they didn't want it to sound too "churchy," so they called it a Club. There were no memberships or dues, so everyone was included—all you had to do was show up!

Today, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club is America's premiere television broadcast for great preaching. Each program features a different speaker, drawn from a wide spectrum of denominations and faith traditions. Over 1,000 speakers have appeared on the program since those earliest gatherings at the beginning of the century.

Read on for a more complete history of this unique organization.

Clifford W. Barnes was a young, idealistic graduate of Yale Divinity School and an ordained minister in the Congregational Church. At Yale in the 1890s, he was secretary of the YMCA, where one of his responsibilities was to preside at a weekly Sunday evening religious meeting, at which distinguished visitors like D. L. Moody and Henry Drummond gave informal talks to the students.

In 1898, while on his honeymoon in Europe, Barnes accepted the position of director of the Christian Student Movement in Paris. Once again his responsibility was to preside over weekly Sunday evening religious services, this time for the English speaking students who made their home in the Latin Quarter. He invited distinguished speakers to give the evening talks, insisting that the messages be of a religious nature.

 In 1904, Clifford Barnes came to Chicago to be director of the newly organized Religious Education Association. He had lived in Chicago for a few years following graduation fromYale, and had worked closely with social worker Jane Addams, so he was already familiar with the challenges this great American city faced and had already established considerable contacts among its prominent citizens.

One of the things he noticed about Chicago was that there were no Sunday evening religious services in the heart of the city. Following Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, most of the churches sold their property and moved into residential districts, many of them a long distance from the Loop. The construction of new hotels provided housing for an increasing Loop population of men and women who had come to Chicago to do business, but beyond the honky-tonks and dance halls that began to flourish, there was precious else to do in the Loop after dark.

It was in 1907 that Barnes struck upon the idea of starting the same kind of weekly Sunday evening religious meetings that he had been involved with at Yale and in Paris. He gathered a large and representative group of church leaders at a luncheon at the Union League Club and pitched the idea to them, but he received very little encouragement. Later that year, he was eating his customary luncheon at the Chicago Club, where many of the city's prominent industrial and commercial leaders gathered. While relating to his table companions how he had failed with the clergymen to start a Sunday evening religious service in the Loop, it occurred to him to ask these men to help him produce such a program. "Suppose we do it," he said,"and make it an organization of Christian business leaders to promote the moral and religious welfare of the city." The idea met with instant approval and the group drew up plans for launching just such a program. The first Sunday evening service was to be held in Orchestra Hall, February 16, 1908.

Invitations were posted, announcements were published, programs were printed, and the stage was set. Some time before 7:00 p.m. on February, 16, people began to gather at the entrance to Orchestra Hall. By the time the doors opened at 7:30 a crowd was blocking the sidewalks. When the organ prelude began at 7:45, no question remained as to the success of the idea. The sight of the opening night crowd was a joy and a delight to Clifford Barnes and his friends from Chicago's business and industrial elite.

In those early years, some of the best-known names in American religion and public life were speakers on the programs, including social worker and reformer Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Booker T. Washington, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Clifford Barnes' contacts in the political, civic and religious worlds allowed him access to some of the best thinkers in America and they eagerly accepted invitations to speak at these prestigious assemblies.

In 1922, a potent new communications tool was added to expand the Chicago Sunday Evening Club's audience. On Christmas Eve, the weekly programs began radio broadcasts live from Orchestra Hall and overnight, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club gained a national presence, earning it the title of "The Nation's Pulpit." Estimates of listeners in the 1920s and 1930s often ran into the hundreds of thousands each week, allowing dynamic speakers like George A. Buttrick from Harvard University, Henry Sloane Coffin from Union Theological Seminary, and W.E.B. DuBois from Atlanta University, to reach an ever-widening national audience. As a pioneer in religious broadcasting, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club clearly demonstrated the power and potential of radio for reaching people eager for a word of hope and encouragement.

Weekly programs continued in Orchestra Hall with few interruptions, even after Clifford Barnes' death at the age of 80 in 1944. He was succeeded as President of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club by investment banker, John Nuveen, Jr. (serving from 1944-1955), and then by Joseph O. Hanson, the former President and CEO of Swift International (serving from 1955 to 1969).

It was the beginning of the age of television, and in March of 1956, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club began live broadcasts from Orchestra Hall on Chicago's new educational television station, WTTW/Channel 11. The picture was black and white and the images were grainy, but this exciting new technology once again added an important new dimension to the organization's outreach. The list of speakers continued to be an impressive one, including names like Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Tillich, Ralph Sockman, and Elton Trueblood.

By 1969, television viewing was universal in the United States and live audience attendance in Orchestra Hall had dwindled. The program was moved into WTTW/Channel 11's new studios where it could take advantage of new color television technology, but the format remained essentially the same.

With the explosive expansion of cable television in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club created a half-hour version of its hour-long broadcast in Chicago called 30 Good Minutes, which made its debut on the VISN Channel in 1989.  VISN was a joint venture of the cable industry and 65 religious denominations.  30 Good Minutes remained on VISN when it became the Odyssey Network in the mid-1990s, and continued on the channel until August, 2001, when the Odyssey Network re-launched again as the Hallmark Channel.