Last Saturday morning, I participated in the annual Chicago Hunger Walk, walking along the lakefront at Melrose Harbor to raise money for city social agencies who receive regular food donations.

After the event, the group I’ve recently been volunteering with (Housing Opportunities for the Elderly) decided to avoid the super-crowded lakeside bike path and return to their Edgewater headquarters via neighborhood streets.

Wouldn’t you know, as the traffic lights dictated our exact walking route, we ended up smack-dab in front of J.C. O’Hair’s old behemoth North Shore Church at Wilson and Sheridan, now inhabited by a largely black church, Uptown Baptist, and an Asian group that meets under the name “Good News Evangelical.”

The huge old sign, “Christ Died for Our Sins,” still stands to draw far-away eyes from its precious billboard-level real estate on the roof.

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What always chokes me up no matter how many times I go by that building—and I just spent last year living in a studio apartment only a mile-and-a-half westward on Wilson—is knowing how instrumental the local ministry from that address was to the entire country and even the world.

Then I think about the astounding fact that my church in Rolling Meadows, Shorewood Bible Church, is the sole inheritor of the old North Shore. My preacher, Richard Jordan, was the last one to preach from its pulpit in the late ’70s before the property’s sale.

As Jordan testifies of O’Hair, “No other single individual had more to do with spreading across America the truth of the distinctive message and ministry of Paul—what we now call ‘Mid-Acts Dispensationalism.’ Understand we have that as a heritage! We didn’t just come sucked out the end of somebody’s thumb. There have been people from Paul’s day until now preaching this. Mr. O’Hair was addicted to the ministry and he had saints working with him who were addicted to the ministry.”

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It was in 1932 that O’Hair’s eight-year-old daily neighborhood radio program became nationally broadcast, and when he died in 1958, O’Hair shared the record for one of the two longest continuous radio programs on the air. The other one was Amos and Andy!

To give a brief history of John Calvin O’Hair, he was born Dec. 31, 1876 in Little Rock, Ark. Trained as an accountant, he got the itch as a young man to see the world and wound up becoming U.S. ambassador to Mexico before returning to the states to establish himself as a prominent businessman in the lumber and construction business.

In 1917, O’Hair, now married to Kansas native Ethel (with whom he had six children), entered into full-time evangelism, preaching and teaching across the country before being invited to pastor North Shore in 1923.

Nine months later, the church built a radio transmitter in the bell tower and started the station WDBY, which stood for “We Delight in Bothering You.”

“Back then you didn’t have a dial to dial up; you had little crystal sets and whatever station was broadcasting—the nearest one is what you listened to,” explains Jordan. “It just overflowed everything else.”

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A classic anecdote is about a woman who ran a brothel upstairs from a bar her husband owned directly across Wilson Avenue from the church building.

As Jordan tells the story, “Every day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, O’Hair came on with his radio broadcast and, well, it kind of messed up the music in the bar and in the brothel. It makes it rough when ‘Nothing but the Blood’ is being sung and the gospel’s being preached.

“One day she got mad enough and determined, ‘I’m going to put that preacher in his place.’ She stormed across the street, went inside and there was Pastor O’Hair, standing behind the glass screen with the microphone and he’s preaching.

“He sees her walk in and sit down, so he turns to her and preaches the gospel directly to her and she sat on that desk and got saved that day. Well, obviously it changed the business across the street. Her husband never got saved, but she did and wound up in the mission fields in South America for almost 50 years!”

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It was O’Hair’s commitment to the local church, more than anything else, that made his ministry a national success.

“For some reason that fact seems missed, but back then’s when the movement . . . O’Hair was in Chicago with a church that impacted the whole region,” says Jordan. “Harry Bultema was up in Michigan with a church that impacted that whole area. Later on, Henry Culp was out there in Pennsylvania.

“If you were in central Pennsylvania, you knew something about who Culp was. If you went into the Deep South and knew something about ‘right division,’ you knew Henry Grube and Roy Lange. If you went out onto the West Coast, you knew who William Root was. In the Northwest, you knew Lloyd Peterson.

“There were hundreds and hundreds of men just like O’Hair. He sort of stood out as the one everyone saw. What they understood was the whole movement was moving and working through local churches and regions, impacting the whole areas.”

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North Shore organized a men’s grace fellowship that was attended by up to 400 men each month.

“Three or four times a year they would buy a full-page in the Chicago Tribune for $28,000—a lot of money back then—and O’Hair would write a gospel message,” says Jordan. “We’ve got copies of them in our Heritage Room at the church.

“In the late ’60s, all that kind of went away and I used to ask questions about why and guys would lament how it just fell apart. You know what happened to the Grace Movement? It fell out of the hands of the leaders of local churches and into the hands of para-church institutions, and when came time for them to do some of the things the passage in I Corinthians 16 says to do, they didn’t have the context of the local church to do it out of.

“I’ve said many times you can’t practice separation God’s way if you haven’t learned to do it in the context of the local church. And when it’s done brutally, and not with the charity, it’s generally done outside of the context of a grace church.

“When I moved to Chicago in 1979, I learned something about O’Hair by talking to the handful of older folks who were still left. I’d had a lot of people tell me about why O’Hair was a great man and why his ministry was a success, but I discovered something talking to his people.

“And there were two things that most people don’t seem to notice. He was a great dispensationalist. On his grave in the Wheaton Cemetery the family marker has II Timothy 2:15 right under his name. He was Mr. Right Division.

“He was a strong doctrinal proponent. When the congregational church went into modernism, the little record book we still have has a record of O’Hair standing up against it and leading the church out. That’s when it became not the North Shore Congregation but North Shore Church, standing for truth against error.”