The City Temple is most famous as the preaching place of the 20th century liberal theologian Leslie Weatherhead.

[8] The Poultry Chapel was closed on 16 June 1872, and until the new church was ready, the congregation met in the great hall of Cannon Street Hotel in the morning, in Exeter Hall in the evening, and in the Presbyterian Church, London Wall, for mid-day services on Thursdays.

[9] The Memorial Stone of the new building, to be called the City Temple, was laid by Thomas Binney on 19 May 1873.

[12] The building, from its location and size, began to assume the character of a Nonconformist cathedral, and became the most important Congregational pulpit in Britain.

As age began to tell on Parker, Reginald John Campbell, a Congregational minister in Brighton, was called in 1902 to act as his assistant.

Campbell decided to answer his critics by issuing a volume entitled simply The New Theology, which laid out his position.

[22] Campbell himself came to a crisis of faith when several New Theologians began to question the doctrine of the deity, and even the historicity, of Christ.

[25] On joining the Church of England, and at the request of some old Congregational friends, with whom he remained on good terms, he wrote an account of the development of his thought in A Spiritual Pilgrimage (1916).

Though Joseph Fort Newton had been educated at Louisville's Southern Baptist Seminary,[26] he was a theological liberal.

Some argued that, since the Congregational Church had not had a Congregationalist pastor since 1915, when Campbell left, they should call a minister from within their own denomination.

[35] In the event, the man called was a Methodist minister, then stationed in Leeds, Leslie Weatherhead.

During The Blitz, the City Temple was "gutted by fire from incendiary bombs dropped from enemy aeroplanes".

After the war, Weatherhead raised the funds to rebuild the City Temple, largely from John D. Rockefeller Jr.