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Like Willow Creek, the institutional churches began by listening to their new neighbors. What did they need? What might get them to come to church? In response to what they heard, they built churches that didn't look like churches. Many looked like warehouses; St. Bartholomew's Episcopal in New York was a nine-story building with a rooftop garden.

They didn't look like churches because they included new kinds of facilities for new kinds of ministry—gymnasiums, swimming pools, medical dispensaries, employment centers, loan offices, libraries, daycare centers, and lots of classrooms. Critics invariably complained that their worship spaces seemed to be an afterthought, but these buildings were designed for seven-days-a-week service.

Institutional churches did away with pew rentals—the system in which the wealthiest families got to reserve pews up front while the poor sat in the back—which in those days was the main revenue source for urban churches. (Contemporary megachurches that want to recapture this lost tradition might consider auctioning off the good parking spaces!)

They held services in several languages. Some dispensed with hymnals and projected song lyrics on the wall. They taught English, hygiene, home economics, and work skills. They showed movies, held lectures, and sponsored concerts.

Shaping ministry programs around the needs of their neighbors made some of these churches huge. St. Bartholomew's employed 249 paid workers and 846 volunteers serving nearly 3,000 members and countless local nonmembers. Russell Conwell's 3,000-member Baptist Temple in Philadelphia built a hospital and a university (Temple University) as well as a large new church. And William Rainsford's St. George's Episcopal in New York City had over 6,600 people involved in its parish ministries. Soon these churches banded together and formed the Open and Institutional Church League, and their example was copied in cities all over the United States.

The Roaring '20s were Paul Rader's heyday, and the innovative character of the Chicago Gospel Tabernacle was matched by other nondenominational evangelical churches. The most famous was Aimee Semple McPherson's 5,300-seat Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, which at its peak pulled in more than 10,000 people every Sunday. Willow Creek's effective use of drama in its services has attracted a lot of attention, and rightly so. But compared to McPherson's productions, Willow Creek's are much less dramatic. Angelus Temple did not have a pulpit, it had a stage, and on its stage Sister Aimee brought to life the glories of heaven, torments of hell, and the allure of the fleshpots of Egypt. Live sheep and camels, ships filled with musicians, roaring motorcycles, screaming sirens, and elaborately costumed casts of dozens were regular fare inside the Temple.

Whenever Sister Aimee premiered a new "illustrated sermon" on Sunday night, Angelus Temple was lit up like a Las Vegas casino. Searchlights swept the sky above the traffic jams, while specially scheduled trolley cars disgorged passengers, and thousands stood in line for hours hoping to get a seat.

Willow Creek's critics often deride its large variety of ministries as "shopping mall" Christianity, but large churches used this approach to ministry long before shopping malls had been invented. Before the turn of the century, institutional churches each sponsored dozens of ministry activities. The same was true of the Gospel Tabernacles. Angelus Temple boasted that it had "something for everyone"—weekday noon services around the city, a slew of youth groups and youth crusades, choirs, orchestras, parades, prayer ministries, healing services, adult classes, courses for new believers, radio broadcasts, a magazine, and, of course, production of the illustrated sermons.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13