The movement’s leaders, beginning with Moody, tended to pastor large, urban congregations, many becoming “institutional churches” that combined preaching, evangelization, education, and poverty relief. These institutional churches were worlds unto themselves, occupying blocks of major downtown areas—in Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago—with pastors more comfortable asking their denominational overseers for forgiveness than permission. In the nineteenth century, the Moody network remained rooted in the Great Lakes basin and New England, though success attracted a smattering of Southern
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