Word: storefronts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Church, which owns a $150,000 brick-and-stone building for services, a gymnasium, and five acres of land. Delamarian's Sunday services draw 200 or more. But what the people hear in his new church is the same strident Bible faith that he taught in the Chicago storefront. "I haven't changed the service," he says. "It's the same out here as in the city...
...suburbs as in city, storefront congregations tend to be small in size, distrustful of "worldliness" and "heresies" in mainstream Protestantism, ardent in their faith, and embellished with such florid names as Faith and Miracle Tabernacle or Church of the Living God. Few of them have fulltime ministers. Church services emphasize oldtime hymns and sermons that pound home a basic Gospel message of Christ's saving grace. There is little or no liturgy. "We feel that all this rising and reading confuses the issue,'' says Pastor Delamarian. "Our message is simple: Have you been saved...
Standing in Judgment? Most of the storefront congregations are made up of white migrants from rural areas, who moved first to the city in search of factory jobs, and then to the suburbs after learning that they could buy a house on terms there for less than they paid for tenement rents. But some fundamentalist ministers claim that their young congregations include doctors, bankers and other professional men who have become dissatisfied with traditional Protestantism. "All the people have to be reached,'' says James Freeman, pastor of the Church of God. Mountain Assembly, in the Cincinnati suburb...
Most ministers of the mainstream Protestant churches profess not to be worried by storefront or cinder-block competition. "They're no real problem." says the Rev. Hugo Leinberger, church extension director for the North Illinois synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church...
...They make something of a splash when they start-but people get a little sophistication, a little education, and this kind of religion loses its appeal." Others are not so sure, and regard the growth of storefront religion as a challenge to the relevance of traditional Protestantism...