I had an interview with David Dault, president and CEO of the Chicago Sunday Evening Club. The Chicago Sunday Evening Club was founded by Clifford W. Barnes in 1908 to minister to the business community.
Tell the readers about the Chicago Sunday Evening Club and what it does.
We tell stories that inspire people to put their faith into action for the benefit of Chicago.
We were founded in 1908 as a ministry for the Chicago business community. After the Great Fire, most of the churches had left the Loop and rebuilt farther out in the surrounding area. A group of business leaders, led by our founder Clifford Barnes, saw the need for an organization that would bring a moral and religious voice back to the Loop. Not a church, per se, but a non-denominational charitable assembly that would inspire and enliven the city.
These were the same leaders who - around the same time - founded theChicago Community Trust. Where the Trust was charged with supporting the best in the city from a financial standpoint, the Sunday Evening Club was charged with supporting the well-being of the city from a spiritual standpoint.
From 1908 to the mid-1950s, gatherings would be held weekly from October to May in Orchestra Hall on Michigan Avenue. The event was an immediate and continuing success - with standing-room only crowds spilling out into the street from the 3000-seat theater. In the 1920s, we added radio, and broadcast the proceedings coast to coast in a program called "The Nation's Pulpit." At our height, we had hundreds of thousands of listeners nationwide, and the opening of each season we'd receive congratulations from the likes of FDR and Lord Halifax.
In the 1956, we partnered with the new public broadcasting station in Chicago, "Window to the World," or WTTW. We became their longest-running program, and one of the first religious programs on television anywhere. Many later programs (more Evangelical and more well known), including the 700 Club and the PTL Club, learned from us and copied our format (in case you ever wondered why they both called themselves "clubs"!)
In moving to television, we traded our 3,000 person weekly face-to-face audience for a 30 person studio audience and a wider, but more remote, broadcast audience. We were still reaching people with "An Hour of Good News" (as the show came to be called), but the connection was not as immediate.
Over time, our audience aged, and our format remained pretty much the same as it was in the 1950s. In the 1990s, at the suggestion of WTTW, the hour of good news was shortened to "30 Good Minutes." We still had a nationwide presence through distribution by the Odyssey Networks, but our vision for its impact began to wane.
With the start of the new century, and with our own hundredth anniversary, our Board of Directors took a deep look at our mission and our programming, and suggested some bold and dynamic changes. A new vision was brought to our work - instead of focusing on one television show, we would use our resources to produce a variety of types of programs. Each would have a focus on bringing inspiring stories of faith into the media landscape. We would look at problems that cities like Chicago share - poverty, incarceration, immigration, violence - and we would highlight how communities of faith are making a positive impact to help those problems.
In conversation with WTTW, we began a new series of hour-long documentaries that look at issues like violence and poverty and tell stories of the good that congregations and faith communities are doing. We have aired three so far, and we are at work on two more that will air in 2016.
We have also incorporated other programming, including a daily two-minute "Religion Moments" podcast, an weekly hour-long interview show for public radio called "Things Not Seen: Conversations about Culture and Faith," and a variety of face-to-face events. These include our annual citywide Leadership Prayer Breakfast (first Friday in December), and a number of monthly salons that bring together religious and business leaders from across the city.
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What is your next project?
Projects!
We are hard at work planning our next Leadership Prayer Breakfast, which will be held Friday, December 4th at the Hilton Grand Ballroom. Last year over 600 people from across Chicagoland attended.
We have begun pre-production on our next two documentaries for public television. The first is looking at how congregations support people facing old age and the end of their lives. The second will focus on the changing face of our educational system, as dwindling funds and increased privatization create both new opportunities and hardships for our youth.
Our radio show, Things Not Seen, is now available to public radio stations nationwide through the PRX (Public Radio Exchange) network. This fall we will feature interviews with national figures like Senator John Danforth, Eboo Patel, and Jim Wallis.
We are launching a bold new citywide venture, partnering with the Chicago Ideas organization and several seminaries in the area, to create a "Faith and Values Hub" - a focus point for conversations that bring together civic and moral issues for the benefit of the city.
And we are continuing to develop our national partnerships with Commonweal Magazine, Sojourners Magazine, and the Council on Foreign Relations "Religion and Foreign Policy" Project.