Before January 1947, American religious radio meant one thing: a microphone set up at the back of a sanctuary, carrying a church service more or less unaltered to whoever happened to tune in. Dale Oldham changed that. Pastor of Park Place Church of God in Anderson, Indiana, Oldham began broadcasting the Christian Brotherhood Hour from a station in Coffeyville, Kansas, on January 4, 1947, and built the program around something closer to a variety show than a sermon: hymns and gospel songs woven between a warm, conversational message rather than a transcribed service. Listeners responded. Within fifteen years the program aired on more than 260 stations across forty four states and a dozen countries outside the United States, and the format Oldham improvised, music paired with plain talk rather than pulpit oratory, became the template nearly every religious radio program that followed would use in some form.
The Christian Brotherhood Hour belonged, from its first broadcast, to the Church of God movement centered in Anderson, Indiana, a Wesleyan holiness body that rejects formal denominational membership rolls on principle. Oldham stayed at the microphone until 1968; the program itself did not stop. It continues today under a new name, Christians Broadcasting Hope, carrying programming in Arabic, Creole, English, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Odia, Spanish and Swahili across North and South America, Ireland and Europe, an unbroken run now approaching eight decades from a single station in Kansas.