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The original Unity Church was built in Oak Park in 1872. It was a wood framed building with a tall steeple over the front entrance, a pitched roof, and windows with pointed arches along the nave. Wright had been a member of the Unitarian church since 1892, he believed that salvation was not a concept limited to a heavenly afterlife, but rather found in the perfection of human character in the earthly lifetime--that divinity is found in the souls of human beings on earth not in a heavenly body.

On June fifth, 1905, the steeple of this first Unity Temple was struck by lightening and destroyed by fire. In September of that same year the church building committee commissioned Wright to design a new church, with a budget of only $35,000.