Religion: Storefronts in the Suburbs

Five years ago, a young Army veteran named Michael Delamarian, a graduate of South Carolina’s Bible-teaching Bob Jones University, took over the rundown, 90-member Calvary Bible Church—a storefront operation on Chicago’s Near North Side. It was an area crowded with similar churches, and within a year Delamarian decided that “it was more in keeping with the Lord’s work” to move. He picked suburban Mount Prospect, 14 miles away, as his new place to serve.

Now Delamarian is pastor of the Mount Prospect Bible 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.”

Preaching the Bible. Michael Delamarian is not the only Biblical preacher to find newer and bigger congregations in the suburbs. Across the U.S., in working-class townships and bedroom communities that surround the great industrial cities, fundamentalist religion—in tiny, independent churches that feature emotion-laden sermons and preach a faith based upon an unerring Bible—is beginning to threaten the traditional suburban hegemony of the mainstream Protestant denominations.

One fundamentalist leader estimates that around Chicago there may now be as many as 1,000 “storefronts”—as preachers persist in calling them, although in the suburbs they are more often housed in old churches bought from mainstream denominations, or in simple (and cheap) concrete-block structures. Last month the Rev. Lyle Schaller, director of the Regional Church Planning Office in northeastern Ohio (which represents twelve Protestant denominations), reported in The Lutheran magazine on a survey of new church construction near Cleveland. In the suburban triangle formed by Cleveland, Lorain and Elyria, no fewer than eleven of the 15 new congregations that have been organized since 1955 are Bible-preaching fundamentalist groups.

In 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 of Norwood. “We have college people, high school people, and, as in all churches, the uneducated.”

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.

The storefronts, says the Rev. Everett Francis, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Dearborn Township near Detroit, “stand in judgment upon us. They go to the people—they express an interest, a concern we don’t always show except in an academic way.”