Chicago's religious importance did not end with the Parliament. The Great Migration brought several hundred thousand African Americans north between the wars, and their churches remade the city's religious life. Thomas A. Dorsey, a blues pianist who turned to sacred music, worked from Pilgrim Baptist Church and, with singers including Mahalia Jackson, established gospel as a composed and published form rather than only a congregational one; the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses was founded in the city in 1933. Storefront congregations multiplied alongside the large churches, and the tension between the two shaped what black Protestant worship in northern cities became.
The same migration carried new movements. Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam from Chicago from the 1930s, and its headquarters and principal mosque remain there, so the organisation's doctrinal and institutional centre has always been this city rather than New York, where its best known minister worked.
Other traditions built their American centres nearby. The Bahai House of Worship at Wilmette on the lakeshore north of the city, begun in 1920 and dedicated in 1953, was the first in the western hemisphere and is still the faith's principal temple in North America. Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1886, became a central institution of American evangelicalism and of the fundamentalist movement that grew out of it. The centenary Parliament of 1993, held in the same city, issued the declaration Towards a Global Ethic drafted by the theologian Hans Kung.