1949 - 2009

Every Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m., Kenosha Bible Church broadcasts its Sanctuary Live! worship service over 1050 AM WLIP radio—and this has been going on throughout the Kenosha area every Sunday for the past 60 years! And now, through WLIP’s real-time streaming audio, our weekly radio broadcast is available anywhere in the world via the Internet.

KBC’s radio broadcast is the longest continuous-running program on WLIP. Many KBC’ers first come to appreciate our broadcast when they aren’t physically able to attend church services due to illness or other circumstances. We can still feel “connected” through the worship music, announcements and message recorded live on Sunday mornings during our 9:00 a.m. service.

Our listening audience, however, extends far beyond those within our church family. According to WLIP’s latest ratings report, KBC’s radio broadcast reaches approximately 1300 listeners each Sunday, from Raymond and Caledonia in the north to Grayslake and North Chicago in the south, extending as far west as Genoa City and Slades Corners.

KBC and WLIP – Radio Partners for 60 Years

This summer, KBC is celebrating its 60th anniversary of broadcasting Sunday morning worship services over WLIP... 60 years of broadcasting our worship services to shut-ins, those who are ill or in nursing homes, travelers on I-94, and others who cannot make it to a church for various reasons.

In 1947, WLIP signed on the air from the basement of the Kenosha National Bank Building at Seventh Avenue and 57th Street in downtown Kenosha, licensed as a daytime-only station.

In 1949, KBC began broadcasting its worship services on the young radio station at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoons. The broadcast had to be in the afternoon because the preferred 11:00 a.m.–12:00 noon program time slot was already taken. The sermons were preached by Reverend L. Jackson Derby, KBC’s pastor from 1947–1952.

In 1950, KBC learned that the Calvary Memorial Church in Racine, which had been using the 11:00 a.m.–12:00 noon time slot to broadcast their church service, was giving it up. On May 1, 1950, KBC had a special meeting to vote on the proposal of broadcasting the Sunday morning service at 11:00 a.m. instead of 3:30 p.m. The vote was unanimous to change our service broadcast to that new time.

Throughout the years since then, our broadcast times varied according to our worship service times because our broadcast was “live.” In June 2006, our broadcast time changed back to 11:00 a.m. and our audio quality was greatly improved when we began recording our service digitally and transporting it on CD to WLIP for broadcast instead of transmitting live from our facilities.

We thank God for enabling us to broadcast our services to our community these past 60 years!