Graduate Pastor John Steinbruck tells Lutheran Seminary students about ministry ‘in the shadow of The White House’

PHILADELPHIA -- "The ultimate gift that the homeless gave to our ministry at Luther Place was to give us a reason for being," the Rev. John Steinbruck told students and faculty at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP) yesterday.

Over 27 years, Steinbruck was a guiding force in transforming the ministry of Luther Place Lutheran Church on Washington’s Thomas Circle to provide counseling, comfort and shelter annually to 13,000 homeless and disenfranchised citizens of Washington, D.C. It’s all taken place in the shadow of The White House. The direction of Steinbruck’s ministry began more than 40 years ago in Philadelphia as he kept passing the Seminary on his way to a construction job in Chestnut Hill. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Industrial Engineering, but he told his audience the idea of becoming a pastor wouldn’t go away. He graduated from LTSP four decades ago. Recently retired, Steinbruck is a visiting professor at the Seminary.

"When we started at Luther Place in the late 1960s, Washington was a crazy place," Steinbruck said during his convocation message. It was during the height of disturbances, uprisings and nationwide concerns over Vietnam and civil rights. "Fourteenth Street (a focal point for the homeless ministry today) was filled with smoke, then tear gas. The protesting bodies of thousands of young people covered the Washington Mall. Our church did not have a future. We had prostitution going on around us, sometimes on the steps of

our church. It was not the kind of place that young couples would want to bring their children to church ...

"Today, all of the nation’s capital can see the difference faith makes in a community," Steinbruck said. "Our church cannot die. It must live for the sake of those who find refuge there. People who’ve come as strangers have given us a future, a reason for being."

Luther Place’s N Street Village features a variety of shelters and support programs. The congregation runs a clean and septic Fourth Floor shelter and 95 units of low-income housing. "The shelter isn’t an end in itself," he said, noting that Luther Place provides job training and counseling to assist people toward better self-esteem and less dependence. Other shelters include the Harriet Tubman House, Sarah House, the Raoul Wallenberg House -- all offering shalom to strangers in various phases of urban struggle. The shelter includes a controversial cemetery for the homeless.

He described the leaders of the congregation as individuals unflinchingly willing to take a chance "for Christ’s sake..." even though the church building has often been filled with distressing odors and the worst kind of grime. "No one is turned away," he says. The beginning came during the heart of a winter in which formerly warehoused people with mental illness were being mainstreamed back into communities. "We were encountering people speaking to voices we couldn’t see. And some of them were dying in office building entryways, wrapped in cardboard because they had no place to go..." The congregation sent out more than 1,000 letters inviting other surrounding churches to join them in meeting the mounting crisis. "We didn’t get one reply," Steinbruck recalls.

"But if you study the ministry of Jesus you realize he was on the streets, hearing, feeling, entering into the pain of exiles of his day," Steinbruck said. "And we knew we belonged on the streets relating to the nomadic, homeless Bedouins of our day...We wanted to treat strangers as family when they find themselves in the modern desert because otherwise they would be consigned to death..." 

The result has led to remarkable turnarounds. He spoke of a former prostitute once addicted to crack cocaine who has turned her life around.

But the struggle amid many signs of affluence goes on. Near Luther Place are several unrelated shelters for the homeless which are closing down, Steinbruck said. "As I speak today, several of these shelters are conducting a raffle to decide which 45 women they are housing will go back out onto the street..."