Rev. John Steinbruck: Spiritual Role Model

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a life counts for a million or more. Last week I attended a memorial service for Reverend John Steinbruck who died on March 1st at the age of 85.

When I moved to Washington D.C. in 1984 to take the post as the executive director of the Jewish Community (Relations) Council of Greater Washington, John was already a legend in a city that is somewhat jaded by all of the personages of importance (or perceived self-importance). John came to Washington in 1970 to be the senior pastor of Luther Place Church. His church was at the corner of 14th and N Streets, an area that a couple of years earlier had burned in the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Luther Place had a beautiful, historic building but its membership had made the exodus from the decaying inner city and its future looked dim. John liked to say that his church stood at the crossroads of prostitution, drugs and political power because all three were in the vicinity in great quantity.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on March 31, 2015.

I first met John standing on 16th Street across from the Soviet Embassy. The Community Council that I headed was the sponsor of this demonstration of solidarity with our sisters and brothers behind the Iron Curtain. Every day at 12:30pm, a different Jewish organization took responsibility for standing silently across from the Embassy for 15 minutes holding signs that said “Free Soviet Jews”. The vigil took place without interruption for 21 years, from 1970-1991. John was a great champion of human rights and that commitment led him to take a trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 to meet with Jews. He came back deeply committed to the cause and on many Jewish holidays John, along with a handful of his congregants were the ones who stood vigil across from the Embassy.

But Soviet Jewry was only one of John’s many crusades. Aware that within a few blocks of his church a few dozen people slept on the streets of the Nation’s Capital, John challenged the churches and synagogues of the area to practice “Biblical Hospitality” by taking the homeless into their buildings overnight. The idea made for a great sermon but no clergyperson in town had the courage and the determination to walk the talk. How would a congregation support such an effort? What would it cost? How would security issues be handled? How could budgets accommodate the exorbitant insurance premiums that would result? John taught by example. His Sunday School classrooms were not being used. Let’s open the doors he told his Board. His Board raised all of the expected objections at which point John said: “This is a church and we don’t put God to a vote”.  The sheer force of his moral argument carried the day and within weeks homeless people were invited to come in off the street to get a hot meal and bed down in Luther Place’s classrooms.

Very few congregations followed John’s lead in bringing the homeless into their buildings but they were inspired to support his efforts through financial contributions and a legion of volunteers. John built a compassion-industrial complex, an array of institutions all growing out of his simple but profound commitment to help the most vulnerable among us. At his urging, Luther Place bought the townhouses across the street from his church which became a continuum of care facilities for homeless women. He then raised millions of dollars to build a state of the art residential facility for homeless women called N Street Village. The homeless needed medical care so the Zacchaeus Free Clinic was founded where physicians volunteered their time to provide free care to the city’s homeless. To address the chronic food insecurity of the city’s poor, John inspired the founding of Bread for the City whose “glean machine” van picked up leftover food from events all over the city and turned that food into meals for the poor.

Realizing how many young adults were turned off to institutional religion but motivated to follow the model of the life of Jesus in serving the poor and needy he created the Lutheran Volunteer Corps (LVC) modeled on the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. For a year, recent college graduates would live communally in a house in the poorest section of a city and work with a non-profit social justice agency, earning just enough money to pay for their expenses. The Jewish organization, Avodah, which offers the same opportunity for Jewish young adults, owes its founding to John Steinbruck because Rabbi David Rosenn, Avodah’s founder, spent time with John and LVC which inspired him to create Avodah.

It is breathtaking to realize the power of one person’s ministry to change the life of so many—from homeless people who got a new lease on life because they were nurtured by the institutions created by John Steinbruck to middle class people of faith who came to realize that religion can and should be about much more than worship and ritual.

As I sat in the pews at Luther Place Church during the memorial service for Rev. John I could not help but think what our world would look like if clergy across the religious spectrum acted on their faith in the way that John acted on his. Very few are cut out to be a prophetic voice the way John was; it is a hard and lonely road. Yet people are hungry for that kind of inspired spiritual leadership in a world that seems more broken every day.