Resources to deepen your faith

Speaker History
Short Documentary
Staff Biographies

Our Mission Statement

The Chicago Sunday Evening Club gives voice to faith stories and ideas that enrich individual lives, engage people of all faiths, and encourage spiritual growth.

Our Name

We know it's an unusual name. It dates 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 "churchy," so they called it a Club. But there were no memberships or dues. Everyone was included—all you had to do was show up!

What We Do

Today, the Chicago Sunday Evening Club produces 30 Good Minutes, a television broadcast and web site that features some of the leading voices in religion, as well as the stories of everyday people whose lives reflect the rich tapestry of religious life in America.

On Air
30 Good Minutes is an award-winning weekly broadcast on WTTW Channel 11 (PBS Chicago) and in syndication in other U.S. cities. It features many of America’s great religious thinkers, selected from a broad range of denominations and faith traditions. The program explores topics of faith through short meditations (sermons), documentaries, interviews and commentaries.

On Line
Our award-winning web site has an extensive (and growing) Sermon Database of searchable messages on dozens of topics – including many on video and MP3 files – featuring the great speakers from our 30 Good Minutes broadcasts. Our Topic Pages and Short Video library feature brief documentaries about the spiritual journeys of people from all walks of life and short reflections by writers, pastors and others.

The Early 20th Century

Clifford W. Barnes was a young, idealistic graduate of Yale Divinity School where, in the 1890s, he was secretary of the YMCA. 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.

In 1907 Barnes struck upon the idea of starting the same kind of weekly Sunday evening religious meetings in Chicago 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, Barnes 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.

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.

The Radio Years

In 1922, a powerful new means of communication 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. 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).

The Early Television Years

At the beginning of the age of television, 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 impressive, including names like Martin Luther King, Jr., Paul Tillich, Ralph Sockman, and Elton Trueblood.

By 1969, television viewing in America was virtually universal 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 of the broadcast remained essentially the same. C. Bouton McDougal, a retired R. R. Donnelley executive, was the organization’s president from 1969 to 1974.

The 1980s and 90s

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, in addition to continued broadcasts on WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago. VISN was a joint venture of the cable industry and 65 denominations forming the National Interfaith Cable Coalition (now Faith & Values Media). 30 Good Minutes remained on VISN when it was re-named 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.

The 21st Century

In 2002 the Chicago Sunday Evening Club developed a new format for 30 Good Minutes, adding stories and personal reflections recorded on location to the messages and interviews recorded in the studio. Our archives on the web continue to grow, with an ever increasing library of videos, MP3 files, and text.

As the Chicago Sunday Evening Club approaches its 100th Anniversary in 2008, we look forward to expanding our archives on the web even further, reaching back to the early years of the organization’s history.

Other links on this page:

Speaker History
Short Documentary
Staff Biographies