I am so happy to be here for the kick off event for the Paul Brandeis Raushenbush Center for Urban Ministry! And all of my exciting ministry... What? OH! Walter Rauschenbusch... Well, I guess that is a pretty good name too.

My family is very gratified that you are naming this center after my great-grandfather and honoring his religious life of both contemplation and service. Walter Rauschenbusch was an exceptional figure in the formation of how we understand our selves as Christians and what following Jesus means for the world. However, while admired greatly among ministers, historians, and social progressives he is not a household name. I'd like to give a brief chronology of Walter Rauschenbusch's life and work and principles that can offer us a model for ministry in this time, in God's name.

When I studied Rauschenbusch in seminary, what he was saying seemed obvious to my late 20th century ear. Of course Jesus was not only concerned with each person's individualistic relationship with God, but also with justice within society and specifically with the plight of the poor. Naturally the Kingdom of God was meant to be on earth as it is in heaven, in tangible and practical terms. So thoroughly have Rauschenbusch and his contemporaries helped to form and clarify our understanding of the gospel and the words of the prophets, that it hardly seems possible that - aside from the earliest Christian communities - [for centuries] the predominant approach to the poor had been patronizing charity. Mission had been narrowly defined as saving the soul of the distant native. At the turn of the last century, Rauschenbusch brought the words of the prophets and of Jesus back into their social context and proclaimed what was to become known as the Social Gospel, which has radically affected Christian thought to the present day.

Rauschenbusch was sixth in an unbroken line of ministers. His father, Augustus Rauschenbusch, immigrated from Germany in 1846, coming to America as a Lutheran missionary. Augustus "saw the light" and became a Baptist, and in 1858 joined the faculty at Rochester Theological Seminary. Walter was brought up in a religious atmosphere and had a personal conversion experience as a teenager. He was a brilliant scholar studying in both America and Germany, and received his degree from Rochester seminary in 1886. He had hoped to be a Baptist missionary, but his Old Testament professor had some doubts that he was doctrinally sound on account of Walter's sympathy with the historical critical method of scholarship. At that time it dared to question Moses' sole authorship of the first five books of the Bible, including the passages that described Moses' own death.

Instead, fortunately for us, Rauschenbusch took a pastorate in New York City in an area called Hell's Kitchen, known for its squalor and poverty. While his Old Testament professor may have had doubts on his doctrine, he was at that point fairly orthodox in his faith. He was largely concerned with the saving of souls. It was on account of the people of his congregation that Rauschenbusch began to awaken to societal problems. When commenting later on his conversion to social concerns, Rauschenbusch wrote that his social views "did not come from the church, it came from outside. It came from personal contact with poverty..."

Rauschenbusch's entire life was changed because he was a minister in a church whose congregants were being crushed by poverty. Rauschenbusch was an exceptional pastor, completely dedicated to the congregants whom he served and their spiritual and social needs. He lost his hearing from catching pneumonia visiting parishioners, and when he left his working class congregation offered their then famous minister the highest praise - that above all, he was a good pastor.

The first principle of a Rauschenbusch approach to urban ministry allows the experience of the congregation and of the surrounding communities to lead the programming and theologies of the church. That means that the "you all" here tonight have important wisdom, that combined with intentional reflection will lead to new ways for us to think about God and about how God's realm shall be worked towards in this church and in the wider world. It takes seriously the local church as the best place for this thought to happen. A Rauschenbusch model encourages the intersections between caring for the lives of the congregation, both individual and communal, and developing valuable new ways of proclaiming God's presence in the world.

During his eleven years of ministry in Hell's Kitchen he located the social problem of his congregation, which was largely the working class poor, in the unfair capitalistic economic system, which at that time had no security or safety for the welfare of the poor. He found a discrepancy between his familiar faith, which was largely traditional evangelical, and the social ills the members of his church experienced. The discrepancy made him reassess his faith and re-approach the Bible with this question in mind. He was receiving resistance from his friends who began to urge him to give up social work: "...and devote myself to 'Christian work'. Some of them grieved for me, but I know the work was Christ's work and I went ahead, although I had to set myself against all that I had previously been taught. I had to go back to the Bible to find our whether I or my friends were right."

Rauschenbusch had been rocked by life and he went to the Bible to translate his experience. And he was amazed to see all that he had missed before. This is a parable written by Rauschenbusch:

"A man was walking through the woods in springtime. The air was thrilling and throbbing with the passion of little hearts, with the love wooing, the parent pride, the deadly fear of the birds. But the man never noticed that there was a bird in the woods. He was a botanist and was looking for plants. A man read through the New Testament. He felt no vibrations of social hope in the preaching of John the Baptist and in the shouts of the crowd when Jesus entered Jerusalem. Jesus knew human nature when he reiterated: 'He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.' We see in the Bible what we have been taught to see there. We drop out great sets of facts from our field of vision. We read other things into the Bible which are not there."

This is the second important contribution of the Social Gospel - it gives us the opportunity to improve our faith, to deepen and expand our relationship with God, Jesus and the Bible. In my discussions with Tim Phillips and David yesterday I emphasized that the Rauschenbusch Center should be a place that feeds all of our souls, so that we can go out and do ministry. I see it as the place where the Good News of Jesus is discovered, explored, reveled in and proclaimed. The Center can be a place where you and I can experience the exhilaration of newfound truths through study and reflection, and grow as Christians and religious people. It is from seeing both the birds and the plants, as the parable by Rauschenbusch illustrates, that allows us to go out into the world to challenge blind orthodoxy, or as Rauschenbusch said, to "set ourselves against what we had previously been taught."

From his conversion to the experience of the poor of his congregation, and re-encountering the Gospel with this new light, Rauschenbusch adopted the Kingdom of God as the symbol which encompasses Jesus' teachings on social issues and indeed Jesus' highest goals for earth. Rauschenbusch spent his life on the articulation and the realization of this Kingdom. He organized with other Baptist ministers starting a religious newspaper called "For the Right" meant to represent the view of the worker. In it he wrote one of his more startling pieces titled "It Shall Be". In the article he prophesied the coming of the Kingdom of God. The question he posed to the Christian world was whether the kingdom of God would come with or without their help.

This brings us to a third principal for a center guided by the ministry of Walter Rauschenbusch. We are encouraged to identify and form partnerships with people and institutions that are working for the coming of God's Reign today - even if they are not of the same religious tradition, and even if they are not religious at all. All of Walter Rauschebusch's offspring went off to do amazing things and ultimately so did his grandchildren. My grandfather, Paul Raushenbush, along with my grandmother Elizabeth Brandeis created the original concept and wrote the first Unemployment Compensation bill in Wisconsin. John F. Kennedy later used it as a national model, and since then unemployment compensation has given aid to millions of people in times of unemployment and poverty. Richard Rorty is a grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch who is a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford. He is widely considered America's most prestigious philosopher in the pragmatic school and an important figure for liberal America. These are people who have not worked within the rubric of tradition of Christian ministry that Walter was so invested in, yet they are allies whose goals are Christian ones, if seen through the lens of a Rauschenbusch approach to the Gospel. The Rauschenbusch Center which you are forming can help form alliances between such groups and allow for a mutually influential and beneficial relationship. I might mention here that I am the first in my family to take up Christian ministry since my great-grandfather; in the meantime, amazing ministry in the arts, law, education and politics has been done by my parents' and grandparents' generations.

In 1902 Rauschenbusch joined the faculty at Rochester Theological Seminary. 1n 1907 he published "Christianity and the Social Crisis," and became a nationally known figure. The book outsold every other religious publication, aside from the Bible, from 1907 to 1910. He wrote seven books before his death in 1918. All of his books involved further explication of the Kingdom of God and how we are to bring God's reign on earth. His sympathies lay with "every person suffering from social or economic injustice."

He was the best-known minister in his day, consulted with Presidents, and spoke around the world. His writings went on to influence Reinhold Niehbur, who called Rauschenbusch the real founder of social Christianity and its most brilliant and satisfying exponent. He also was crucial in the formation of Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote that reading Rauschenbusch "left and indelible imprint on my thinking and that Rauschenbush gave to American Protestantism a sense of the social responsibility that it should never lose." Countless ministers, theologians and social activists have pointed towards Walter Rauschenbusch as one of the most influential voices in their understanding of the Gospel.

There are two accusations that Rauschenbusch suffered in his day and that some critics maintain to this day. Oh, and by the way, yes, Rauschenbusch was despised in his day by many of the ancestors of the same people that we find ourselves at odds with in this time. So you know he was doing something right. Many Christians accused Rauschenbusch of losing the spiritual center of Christianity. I want to take this opportunity to say that absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. My great-grandfather was deeply indebted to the spirit of God for leading all that he did. I saw in your newsletter a quote where Rauschenbusch talks of how his contributions were additions, not subtractions, were constructive, not destructive. Some of my favorite writings by him are his prayers, which literally bring me to tears. His biblical scholarship and his historical examination of the church were driven by his pious and unwavering commitment to the church and to God. I know that under your care, you will continue this kind of spiritual searching which leads not merely to dogmatic re-enforcing of tradition, but the kind of reflection that truly allows the spirit to lead us into new and needed places.

The second accusation was that Rauschenbusch was too indebted to the Enlightenment era; that he trusted too much in the potential of humankind to progress and that he was naïve in the ways of sin. Rauschenbusch knew what he was working for was folly in many people's eyes. He was well aware of how deeply this world is wounded and troubled and it grieved him. In 1915, three years before his death, war raged in Europe and threatened to pit his beloved homeland America against his parent's country Germany. His house was vandalized because he was German yet dared to speak as a pacifist. He wrote these words: "I confess my faith falters in the very act of professing it. The possibilities are so vast, so splendid, so far-reaching, so contradictory of all historical precedents that my hope may be doomed to failure."

These words echo for me right now almost a hundred years later. I live in New York City and witnessed with my own eyes the collapse of the World Trade Towers and the deaths that involved. I have been shaken for the last month. I confess my faltering faith while professing the vast and splendid possibilities. I lament historical precedents of war, injustice, selfishness and hate that weighed heavily on Walter Rauschenbusch's heart in his last years, as I wrestle with my own sense of impotence in the face of this troubled and violent world. His words "Doomed to Failure" resound for me like huge cannons - ominous in the distance, weakening my resolve, causing me to flounder - grasping for direction.

A nun in New York recently described this time in the world as Holy Saturday. It is a time when hope for a peaceful and just world seems lost, when despair and distrust of the other is palpable and "historical precedent" reigns on its ugly, banal throne - droning "I told you so", clanging for revenge, ritualizing the "what can you do" shrug of the shoulders, and the only rebellion is fashioned as a nihilistic finger in the air.

It is into this time when we pray for and simultaneously proclaim the resurrection of Jesus risen from the grave. Living our Easter Sunday does not make us naïve. It is the sign of determination that whatever the situation - that we stand for the movement from death to life, from cruelty to forgiveness. In the face of war and hate we will live with passion, dancing, hands in the air, wild with shouts of joy. We will hold parties and invite the God that brings life from the grave to transform the concrete reality - like recess from school transforms even the bleakest plot of cement into a play land full of possibilities for the hundreds of children who run towards it with imagination and goodness.

Let the Rauschenbusch Center be nothing less than the place where impossible things are proclaimed possible through God's grace and our hands.

I leave you with a prayer written by my great-grandfather.

The little Gate to God

In the castle of my soul is a postern gate. Whereat, when I enter, I am In the presence of God.

In a moment, in the turning of a thought, I am where God is, This is a fact.

When I enter into God, All life has a meaning, Without asking I know; My desires are even now fulfilled, My fever is gone.

In the great quiet of God. My troubles are but pebbles on the road, My joys are like the everlasting hills. So it is when My soul steps through the postern gate Into the presence of God.

Big things become small and small things become great. The near becomes far, and the future is near.

The lowly and despised is hot through with glory - God is the substance of all revolutions; When I am in Him, I am in the Kingdom of God and in the Home (Fatherland) of my Soul.

Amen.

Paul Raushenbush graduated with honors in practical theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has served churches in New York and Seattle and has been involved in ministry to street youth in Seattle and Sao Paulo, Brazil. Currently, he is a minister on the staff of the Riverside Church in New York City. He is an ordained American Baptist minister following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), one of the founders of the Social Gospel movement. He can be reached by email at pbraushenbush@yahoo.com.