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Under the leadership of Rev. C.H. Bene funds were raised to erect a modern brick building. In 1906 the old building was torn down and the new building featuring a squat square tower and magnificent gothic arched stained glass windows was erected. Built on an unusual plan, the sanctuary was separated from a large open meeting room by sliding pocket doors. With the doors thrown open the floor of the open room became a stage for Sunday school pageants or amateur theatricals. Around the perimeter of the large room, smaller rooms could be created with folding doors for office space or Sunday school classes.

The new building also symbolized a break with the stricter tenets of traditional Calvinism. Not only was the New England meeting house style abandoned, so was Puritan austerity. Colorful stained glass windows in the German style featuring not only Jesus, but an almost Catholic depiction of Mary, would have been considered idolatrous to earlier generations. The magnificent pipe organ promised a more sensual worship.

The financial strains of building the new church helped call into being the congregation's most enduring organization. The Friendly Aid consolidated two earlier women's groups, the Ladies Aid made up of mature matrons and the Friends in Council, a young mother group. The groups united to raise funds for the needs of the church and through the years sponsored a variety of imaginative events including dinners, entertainments, and sales. On more than one occasion the women of the Friendly Aid came through with much needed funds in emergencies. In the darkest days of the Depression they struggled to contribute one nickel each a week to keep the church, then financial floundering, afloat. On such a slender thread did the church's fortunes lie. Much later another women's group, The Evening League made up of working women and mothers of small children also consolidated with the Friendly Aid. The Aid also took responsibility for funeral arrangements including luncheons and flowers. Today the Friendly Aid is made up of the most senior women of the church. While not as physically active as they once were, they continue to care for the welfare of the congregation.

The Rev. William Kilburne reaped the fruits of Rev. Bene's work with a long ministry from 1909 through 1917. It was during these early years of the century that the First Congregational Church began to distinguish itself for its liberal religious presence in a conservative community.

The years after the First World War were difficult for the Church. Church attendance dropped dramatically across the nation in the wake of the disillusion caused by the war's carnage, scientific advances that seemed to negate revealed religion, and the wide open hedonism of the Roaring Twenties. The First Congregational Church was not immune. Thus it was in an already weakened state when the Great Depression hit throwing many members out of work. It became a desperate struggle just to pay the minister and keep enough coal on hand to keep the church from freezing on Sunday mornings.

Rev. William D. Pratt, who assumed the pulpit in 1932, was a pragmatist who recognized that the First Congregational Church needed to find new partners to survive. Other local churches were in no better financial condition. Negotiations were undertaken with the Presbyterians and Baptists to create a single Federated Community Church. Votes for this scheme carried the Congregational and Presbyterian churches but failed with the Baptists and the efforts collapsed.

Then, in 1937 former members of the defunct local Universalist Church who now worshiped at First Congregational remembered a $5000 bequest set aside for the establishment of a new Universalist congregation in McHenry County. It was decided to seek joint fellowship with the Universalists and claim the bequest. Rev. Platt led a Committee of Negotiation including Belle Kimball, Mrs. Jesse Pfeiffer and Ralph McDonnell into discussion with the Fellowship Committee of the Illinois Universalist Convention. The church obtained dual fellowship on May 1, 1938 which included fellowship in the Universalist Church in America. The name of the church was changed to the Congregational Universalist Church of Woodstock and the church was rescued from financial disaster.

Universalists, a liberal evangelical denomination which preached the doctrine of universal salvation and which was also largely Unitarian in theology, had deep roots in McHenry County dating back to the 1830's. Itinerant ministers and lay preachers frequently visited the county. Several short-lived congregations were started. Mary Ashton Rice Livermore and her husband began such a congregation in meeting rooms above a Woodstock tavern in the 1840's. Livermore went on to a significant career as a lay preacher, women's rights advocate, social activist and Civil War heroine. A stable Woodstock congregation was finally organized in September of 1855, a full ten years before the First Congregational Church. The Woodstock congregation persisted until about 1912.

Another McHenry County Universalist congregation was organized by Rev. James R. Mack in McHenry in January of 1853. That congregation built a simple frame meeting house the following year where it worshiped until the church closed in 1929. The building stands today, one of the oldest churches in the County. A Pentecostal congregation worships there now.

To cement relations with the Universalists, the congregation agreed to call a Universalist minister. Rev. Merton L. Aldridge held the pulpit longer than any other preacher before him, serving from December 1938 to January 1949. As minister during the war years he watched attendance climb with the uncertainty of the age.

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