Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend Page A

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.
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    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.
    â€œEvery 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