Methodism, after remarkable numerical advancement before the Civil War, came to terms with its own economic advancement in the later nineteenth century. Able to draw from across native-born American classes, Chicago Methodists in the late nineteenth century created a refined and domesticated middle-class identity around entrepreneurial leadership, organization, and consumption. The elite lay leadership of the church created institutions in Chicago that spread the middle-class faith of their co-religionists. The role of Methodism's lay elite in Chicago declined substantially after the early twentieth century due to generational change and the rise of professional managers and bureaucratic organization in the institutions they had created.

Chicago Methodism established churches among the native working class, immigrants, and the African-American community. Middle-class identity appealed to the aspirations of many of these church members, including Bohemians and African-Americans, and they took on that identity with varying degrees of success and acceptance. Scandinavian and German Methodists used their churches to maintain ethnic identity. Recognizing their ineffectiveness in reaching those not already Protestant and aspiring to the middle class, Methodists attempted mission outreach and formed institutional churches and settlement houses in an attempt to reach their non-Protestant neighbors. These attempts found limited success among the non-English speaking and largely Catholic immigrants, but proximity did lead to increased sympathy. Chicago Methodist response more favorably to workers, strikes, and labor unrest than historians focused on eastern Methodism have noted.

After 1900, Methodist identity meant more about organization and consumption than particular religious experience. As in its efforts to reach the urban working-class, the church attempted to draw in young people and men using holistic ministries with appeals beyond the spiritual. By creating social churches and new congregational organizations formed according to business principles and gathered according to age, gender, and interest, rather than particular religious identity, the church became more solidly middle class, even while it failed to maintain its hold on its own elite or draw in substantial immigrant, working-class members.