Mission at Nuremberg (5 page)

“Since the first of November, prices on paper hit the bottom and at this very moment because of the RECESSION we are struggling desperately to keep Mission Industries going,” he wrote in 1938. “We ask a favor of you. May we have your family mailing list in order to contact all our people with a card or letter asking for cast-off materials such as old clothing, broken furniture, cardboard, newspapers and magazines? . . . We keep fifteen men at work whose families would have been in desperate circumstances without your help.”

Nearly everything—the trucks, the warehouse, and the store space—was donated by Lutherans, but there were expenses. Trucks broke down, warehouses burned, pipes froze.

“We can't keep up with the calls and are badly in need of another truck,” Gerecke wrote in another plea, suggesting pastors put a free ad for Lutheran Mission Industries in their parish paper. Expenditures exceeded $700 a month. “There's no allowance for up-keep of our cars or rent. The situation is desperate. What shall we do? We need the encouragement of your prayers more than you realize. Our work is with the unfortunates, discouraged, the poor, the sick and the dying. May He bless you richly.”

Less than a year after joining City Mission, Gerecke began working with prisoners in the downtown city jail. He held services at the jail at 9:00
A.M.
on the first and third Sundays of each month. At first, about fifteen to twenty prisoners showed up. Gerecke began to bring in music—“the Gospel Songbird, Loretta Rolfingsmeyer,” the Girls Gospel Harmony Trio from Overland, Missouri, and cornet and piano players. By the third year of this program, more than a hundred prisoners turned out for the services.

“Without boasting, the Lutheran services are the only protestant [
sic
] services well attended in that institution,” Gerecke wrote in a newsletter. “The prisoners know without special announcement that the Lutheran services are holding forth. . . . Sometimes the guards join in the service.”

By 1940, Gerecke was “much excited about the attendance at Jail. Remember, the prisoner is not compelled to attend church. The average for Nov. was nearly 160. Even the guards pick up a hymnal to join in singing those fine old Gospel hymns. Does that crowd sing! Sorry we can't invite your people to these services. With Wilma at the piano, Ralph on the cornet, and the pilgrim singers adding their harmonies, believe me, brother, that crowd sings. Even killers will listen to a blood-bought Gospel.”

Gerecke also made his way to the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1940—a visit he called “a high spot”—where he spoke to eleven hundred fifty men. “They seemed visibly touched,” he wrote. “When Chaplain Lindsay asked the men about a return visit, they answered with a tremendous applause. We shall see them again. This may be the opening of a large field. God has been good to us.”

Unsurprisingly, money was a constant issue for a charity operation during the Great Depression. Two of the synod's districts contributed to the agency's budget, which was $11,000 in 1938, about $175,000 in today's dollars. But at the end of that year, City Mission was $500 ($7,500 today) in the red.

Gerecke wrote to the delegates at each Lutheran congregation in the district: “We must have better financial support of work if we are to carry on with the present arrangement. Where shall we get it? Under what circumstances and when? If no financial help comes our way, we will be compelled to retrench our activities in the very near future. Some of you say ‘NO' to this, but what can we do about it? . . . You say, ‘Have faith.' Thank you we do, but how long shall we go on deeper and deeper into debt with no reasonable assurance to be able to pay back?”

The lack of funding was not only a business issue; it influenced the morale of the three missionaries. “When we see only money matters in our work we become terribly depressed because of low funds,” Gerecke wrote at one point, “but when we think of spiritual matters we know the command of Jesus that we are to go out and find the lost and wandering for heaven.”

When eight hundred people attended City Mission's fortieth anniversary service, the collection plate brought in $208.64. Gerecke called the haul “a grand success.”

Ellwanger ran the mission day school and original chapel on the south side. Holls was responsible for about 230 Lutheran patients out of 3,700 who suffered from “mental and nervous disorders” at the City Sanitarium on Arsenal Street in south St. Louis, and 120 Lutherans at the City Infirmary, which housed “the aged, infirm and poor,” next door. Holls also traveled to the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Jefferson Barracks, about fifteen miles south of the city, and conducted services at St. Louis's Lutheran Convalescents Home, Barnes Hospital, and the Home for the Friendless. Gerecke, who also ran the business end of City Mission, was in charge of the Lutheran Mission Industries, pastored his congregation of one hundred at Good Shepherd, and did as much missionary work as Holls.

On Wednesdays, Gerecke went to the City Workhouse, a medium-security prison, at noon, and gave a sermon to the men as they ate in the mess hall. Wednesday evenings, he visited tuberculosis patients at the City Hospital and attended the spiritual needs of those in isolation wards. Three times a week, he made the rounds at Koch Hospital, visiting the two hundred patients under City Mission's spiritual care. On Friday mornings, he visited the isolation patients at Mount St. Rose, a Catholic sanatorium on the far south side of the city. Sundays were Gerecke's busiest days. In 1941, he wrote in a City Mission newsletter about a typical one:

 

First service, fifteen miles from home, at 6 a.m. Another at 7:45 a.m. A hurry up trip to Jail for a 9 a.m. service. Then Sunday School and Church service at 10:45 a.m. at the chapel. Several hospital calls in the afternoon. Evening devotion at 6 p.m. at another institution and evening service at 8 p.m. at the chapel. Your prayers keep us going. God shall supply strength on the way.

A seminary student who worked at City Mission wrote in a 1941 newsletter about the long hours the missioners put in:

 

The work of a city missionary taxes a man's energy to the utmost. Pastor Gerecke and the other men sometimes preach as many as seven or eight sermons per Sunday (5 is normal) and they often are called to the death beds of two or more patients in one night at some city hospital or institution. They never seem to complain, however, because of the personal joy which one receives in administering to sick brethren and sisters who need comfort from God's Word.

Gerecke also made weekly visits to the government's Marine Hospital, west of the city in Kirkwood, and once a month he conducted a service and Bible class for unmarried mothers at the Bethesda Hospital and Home for Incurables, just a block from his former pulpit at Christ Church.

The missioners kept track of everything and anything they could—lists of sermon attendance figures, visitation requests, baptisms, confirmations, marriages—for their annual report. For Gerecke, it would turn out to be good training for the army. In 1937, for instance, Gerecke counted 17, 614 “hearers”—those who'd heard him speak in some capacity about the faith. The three men together baptized 28 adults and 59 children, confirmed 28 adults and 17 children, communed 1,480, married 13 couples, and buried 52 dead that year. “The Gospel has been taught and preached,” Gerecke wrote. “We leave the fruits of our work to the Holy Spirit.”

Like the number-keeping, Gerecke would use much that he learned during his City Mission years as an army chaplain. In a pamphlet handed out at a service and dinner at the fortieth anniversary of City Mission, worshippers were given an overview of some of the work the missioners did each week.

At the Municipal Workhouse, the pamphlet read, Gerecke “preaches a brief Gospel sermon to a large audience in the ‘mess hall' each Wednesday noon where men of both races listen with deep and grateful appreciation and God alone knows how many of these law violators have changed their manner of living as a direct result of these sermons and returned to Christ.”

By 1941, Gerecke had gained large audiences at his lunchtime Workhouse sermons, “all working on ‘spare-ribs' and not eating too loud,” he wrote. “The authorities have been most kind. The prisoners have never disturbed the speaker.”

Gerecke's heart was with these men, many of whom were on their way back out into society with little chance of getting a job. “What can be done for the ex-prisoner?” he wrote in 1941. “When out he needs work to support the family. Nobody seems to care.”

Gerecke believed the work of City Mission was not just about comforting the sick and forgotten. It was about evangelization. He was an evangelical Christian a half century before that term gained political currency. Evangelicals take a verse in Matthew as the bedrock of their faith. In the Gospel's final scene, a resurrected Christ appears to his followers on a Galilee mountain and instructs them to make new disciples by baptizing them in the name of a new faith and by “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Remember, Christ says, in case his instructions are a little daunting, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Evangelicals take this directive, often called the Great Commission, very seriously, seeing it as responsibility to save souls that have been damned to an eternity separated from God. They see the world as a “mission field,” filled with non-Christians who must be rescued. The Gospel is the life raft that can buoy these souls; the “good news” is that Jesus loves them, and to avoid hell all they need to do is to accept his message of love.

For Gerecke, those who had not taken Christ's message to heart urgently needed to. He looked among the wretched of St. Louis and saw what he often called “fields white for the harvest”—a phrase borrowed from the Gospel of John. He wrote in a newsletter about Koch Hospital, where one hundred and eighty of these souls “receive some form of personal instruction in God's word. We enjoy a splendid spirit of cooperation on the part of the doctors and nurses. Dr. Kettlekamp, head of the Hospital, is our friend. The field is white unto harvest. Pray for your laborers.”

City Mission, he often said, was “a soul-winning agency.” “Remember,” he wrote, “we are after souls, lost, strayed souls. Some will miss Hell because you have sent us with the Gospel.”

City Mission's “big job” was “to find souls for Christ,” he wrote in another newsletter.

 

Quite often we find former members of the Lutheran Church in the neighborhoods of our settlement missions and in our city institutions. These we try to re-establish with the Church. The pastor is generally notified and every effort is made to encourage the individual to renew his confirmation vow. Then there are those who have never given a thought to God until affliction struck them down flat upon their backs in the hospital. Sometimes we never quite succeed in winning such discouraged people for Christ, but we keep on trying and consistently bring them the meaning of the cross.

Gerecke was a serious evangelical, but his little chapel was called
Good
Shepherd. He was not a sheep stealer. His respect for faith in general gave him a healthy respect for all faiths, and his years living in a Catholic neighborhood gave him real-world experience with other Christians. In 1941, he wrote in the City Mission newsletter that the missioners were passing out new devotional booklets at Koch and City hospitals.

“Every new patient, if not Catholic, receives a booklet by the missioner upon his arrival,” Gerecke wrote. “That's the opening wedge for spiritual healing. If he is a bona fide member of a protestant church, he is urged to call his pastor. Our missioner backs out of the picture.”

During his nine years preaching at Christ Lutheran, Gerecke had honed his preaching skills and learned the power of a good story. His sermons, both at Christ Lutheran and Good Shepherd, kept people coming back each Sunday. Regulars knew Gerecke was wrapping up when he began a short story—usually about an average person—to illustrate the point of his sermon. Gerecke also realized he could use his monthly newsletters to harness the same storytelling power in writing as he did in his sermons. He believed pastors and delegates who read these newsletters could use the City Mission stories as fund-raising mechanisms as they asked for money from the pews on Sundays, or in their own church bulletins. Often he would end his stories with the phrase, “Tell it and print it.”

He used only first names. Cathleen, he wrote one month, “was found in the TB Division of City Hospital #1. She had spent a number of years in institutions for TB patients and she became an arrested case . . . During the many moments of prayer and meditation spent at her bedside, we found her staunch and true to her Savior . . . Cathleen begged to be with her Lord. Last Tuesday morning we laid her to rest in Our Redeemer Cemetery.”

He often used all capital letters for emphasis, in an effort to goad others to action: Lutherans owed it to themselves to see the City Mission work in person, he wrote: “Come and see for yourself. Then tell it to the congregation with a lot of enthusiasm. DO SOMETHING . . . Brother, if you feel we are wasting our time, tell us so and show us a way out. Become interested in a program for City Mission soul-winning. WELL?”

Sometimes, Gerecke just liked to turn a good phrase in the service of his never-ending, desperate search for financial support. “The summer is on, but there must be no letdown in City Mission work. The old devil is terribly busy during the hot weather,” he wrote in 1941. “Men and women are dying every day and the hospitals are crowded to the doors. Again, we say, the harvest is white. We need your help.”

Another way Gerecke reached the city was through radio station KFUO-AM, founded by his mentor, Pastor Richard Kretzschmar, in 1924, just after the advent of commercial radio. Gerecke's
Moments of Comfort
was originally popular mostly in hospitals, but it soon caught on across KFUO's listening area, bringing him fan mail and even calls to his house. The show was a combination of scripture recitation and soothing sermonizing by Gerecke, whose voice had the depth and clarity of film stars of the decades that followed—Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum. Gerecke brought his favorite musicians and singers with him each week to provide background music and sing hymns.