Broadway United Church of Christ

Broadway United Church of Christ is a Congregationalist Church located on West 71st Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City.

The original Broadway Tabernacle, now known as Broadway United Church of Christ, was founded as the Second Free Presbyterian Church, organized in 1832 by Lewis Tappan for Charles Grandison Finney, a famous evangelist / revivalist from western New York. It was founded on Chatham Street (Manhattan) in lower Manhattan, New York City, in the former Chatham Garden Theatre (built 1824), which became known as the Chatham Street Chapel. This first chapel was abandoned and shortly thereafter demolished in 1836 for the purpose-built Broadway Tabernacle, which was erected in 1836. The Broadway Tabernacle was located at 340-344 Broadway, between Worth and Catherine Lane, and was considered one of the most influential churches constructed in America. Finney influenced the design; it held 2,400 people. Then a Presbyterian church, it was founded as a center of anti-slavery spirit in New York City. Finney left the church to join the Oberlin College's Theology Department in April 1837 and the Tabernacle building was demolished in 1856.

The minister who followed Finney shared neither his anti-slavery attitude nor his ability to gather the large throngs that Finney had. A dispute about this led to the church leaving the Presbyterian fold, through the purchase of the building by a prominent member, editor of The Journal of Commerce, David Hale. He reorganized the church as a Congregational church, and established policies that allowed for freedom of expression. The building was used for a wide variety of purposes, including the first demonstration of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as an anesthetic.

In the following decades, the church became a gathering place for opponents of slavery, advocates of women's suffrage, and prohibitionists, hosting speakers like John Neal, America's first women's rights lecturer, whose speech attracted 3,000 attendees in 1843.

Leaders of the Church took a prominent role in raising a defense fund for the Africans who were captured aboard the ship Amistad; Cinque, the leader of the captives, spoke at the Church as the freed slaves prepared to return to Africa. Members of the Amistad Committee eventually formed The American Missionary Association, an organization that opposed slavery, and established schools, colleges, and churches for freed slaves after the Civil War. William Lloyd Garrison, a prominent abolitionist, and Frederick Douglass, a black newspaper editor and former slave, both spoke at the Church.

In 1839, Andrew Harris, the first African-American to graduate from the University of Vermont, and the sixth in the nation, delivered a speech to 5,000 members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, including this passage:

If the groans and sighs of the victims of slavery could be collected, and thrown out here in one volley, these walls would tremble, these pillars would be removed from their foundations, and we should find ourselves buried in the ruins of the edifice. If the blood of the innocent, which has been shed by slavery, could be poured out here, this audience might swim in it – or if they could not swim they would be drowned.

In 1853, a women's suffrage meeting at the Church was disrupted by a hostile mob, and Sojourner Truth, a conductress of the Underground Railroad, tried to answer the hecklers from the platform before the meeting broke up.