Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend

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