by Tim Townsend
Soon after his mother-in-law’s death, Gerecke realized he was bored with congregational life. For a couple of years, he’d been doing mission work in his free time among the “unchurched” in St. Louis’s poor black neighborhoods, and he’d come to love this work more than what he was doing with his own flock. He wanted to be among people he felt were more desperately in need of hearing the Gospel message. The members of his congregation, sitting in the pews at Christ Lutheran, were good, faithful Christians. They had their problems, like anyone else, Gerecke believed, but they were already on a path toward a salvation they could grasp. Gerecke had become more interested in the city’s wounded, those who were at risk of dying without hearing God’s message of love for them.
In 1935, five years into the Great Depression, Gerecke told the family they were moving from the Christ Lutheran vicarage, and he would no longer be the pastor there. He told Alma they were going to have to find an apartment to rent and he would be a missionary. Alma was shocked, but her husband had made up his mind. That May, Gerecke “followed a call,” leaving a job with a decent salary and housing, to work for a fraction of the pay ministering to the city’s poor, its old, insane, sick, and criminal.
ON A LITTLE HILL off County Road 226, about ten miles west of the Mississippi River, the white-shingled spire of Zion Lutheran Church is just one of many shooting up from the corn and sorghum fields around Gordonville, Missouri. This is middle America, straight out of the picture-book imaginations of Americans who have never been to their country’s vast center. Farmers still wear denim overalls while pitching hay high into the storage spaces under the gambrel roofs of their red prairie barns. The inscription above the doors of the church, a little brick building that’s home to one of the oldest faith communities in Missouri, gives visitors a clue as to its founders’ heritage. “Deutsch Zions Kirche” it reads—Zion German Church. And on the cornerstone below:
Ev. Luth. Zions Kirche
U.A.C.
1865—1915
When the Civil War ended in 1865, the farmers of southeastern Missouri, near Cape Girardeau, wanted desperately to leave four years of brutality behind. So they banded together to share their faith. The “U.A.C.” on the cornerstone of Zion Lutheran Church was a confession of what it was. The initials, which stand for Unaltered Augsburg Confession, signaled that these men and their families were true German Lutherans, followers of the original splinter group to break away from the Roman Catholic Church.
More than three centuries earlier, their ancestors—including Martin Luther and his friend, the theologian Philipp Melanchthon—were called before Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who wanted to halt the growing divide between Luther and Pope Clement VII. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, Melanchthon presented Charles with twenty-eight articles of faith that both disputed charges of heresy made by Catholic loyalists and made clear the theological differences at the root of the Reformation.
The Augsburg Confession was signed by German secular rulers and magistrates—dukes and princes (and also by the mayor and council of Nuremberg). The document was read aloud to Charles V, an event that took two hours, and while it failed to bring unity to Christian Europe, it became the foundational document for the Lutheran denomination.
Ten years later, Melanchthon revised the Confession—a version that was later adopted by John Calvin—and in the generations that followed, some Lutheran churches distinguished themselves from others by the initials U.A.C. to signal that their congregation abided by the original, unaltered Augsburg Confession.
In and around Gordonville, a group of Lutheran farmers—William Hager, Ludwig Siemers, Friedrich Schwab, William Schneider, George Keller, George Siemers, Samuel Nussbaum, and William Gerecke—were intent on abiding by Augsburg. Three months after the end of the war, on August 13, 1865, they signed the original constitution for Zion Lutheran Church. In doing so, William Gerecke—Henry Gerecke’s grandfather—became one of Zion’s charter members.
When Wilhelm Gerecke arrived in America from Brunswick in 1855, he was nineteen years old. He’d made his way to Missouri and bought 150 acres of land near Gordonville. By the time he was twenty-four years old, Wilhelm had become an American citizen and anglicized his name to William. He was a small-time farmer by 1860, using about a third of his land to keep his horse, two “milch cows,” and three hogs and to grow 150 bushels of wheat and 300 bushels of corn.
In southeastern Missouri in the middle of the nineteenth century, corn was king, rising eight feet from the often inexpertly plowed land. Oats and wheat were afterthoughts, planted between corn rows and cultivated in the winter after the corn had been husked. Only workhorses were rewarded with ear corn, and then only when they were working. In the winter, they were let out into the fields and woods to fend for themselves, just like the farmers’ sheep, cows, and hogs.
Many farmers were working just to feed their families. Before there were barns, farmers used horses to separate wheat grain from stalk on giant threshing floors cleared in the fields, and they used hand-cranked mills to divide the wheat from the chaff. Families grew potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons, onions, and lettuce on small pieces of cleared land near the farmhouse. They raised pole beans by letting them climb the many cornstalks. William Gerecke’s life on the farm was severe and simple, qualities that would influence his offsprings’ frugality—and eventually come to haunt his descendants.
Lessons in agriculture had followed William across the Atlantic, but so had civil war. When war came, Missouri—a border state—was hit hard. William enlisted in the Union Army in 1863. By then he had married a fellow German immigrant, Caroline Luecke, two years his junior and from Hanover, Germany, just forty miles from Brunswick. When William went off to war, at age twenty-seven, the couple’s first child, Louis, was less than a year old, and Caroline was pregnant with their second son, Herman. He was born on December 27, 1863.
William Gerecke and his fellow farmers were exhausted by war and its violence, and they banded together in an act of faith to found Zion. But on November 6, 1865, three months after forming the church, William died at age twenty-nine, leaving Caroline to look after the farm and raise Louis and Herman. Henry Wessel, who owned an adjoining farm to the Gereckes’, became the boys’ guardian, and on Valentine’s Day 1867, he married Caroline. Nine months and two days later, Caroline gave birth to her third son, whom she named William.
When their father died, Louis Gerecke was three years old and Herman was not yet two. Henry Wessel raised the boys as his own, and he preserved William Gerecke’s farm for them. Each year, Wessel calculated the amount of interest his wife’s sons received from their $693.14 inheritance. In 1873, after taxes and probate court fees, their total balance was $773.90. By 1882, when the boys were eighteen and nineteen, the balance was $1,335.82, the equivalent of nearly $30,000 today—and there was the farm.
On November 3, 1892, Herman married a woman with the same first name—and from the same town as—his mother: Caroline Kelpe from Hanover, Germany. She went by “Lena.” He was twenty-nine, she was twenty and the couple moved into the farmhouse that William Gerecke had left to his sons nearly thirty years earlier. Exactly nine months later, on August 4, 1893, their first child was born. On August 27, Henry (Heinrich) Friedrich Gerecke was introduced to the Christian world at Zion Lutheran, the church his grandfather had formed in the wake of war.
A key article in the Augsburg Confession says that man cannot be forgiven for his sins through his own “merits, works or satisfactions.” Luther’s friend Melanchthon wrote that “we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith.” That theology became central to the work of William Gerecke’s grandson.
HERMAN, LENA, AND HENRY lived on the Gerecke farm, off County Road 203, for ten years before Lena had another child—a girl this time. Leonora Gerecke was born April 13, 1903. The family called her Nora, and she was soon joined by a playmate—Fritz—when the Gereckes adopted a secon
d cousin, Fred Conrad Gerecke, who was six years younger than Henry.
Herman, like most farmers, thought of his work as a family project, and Fred’s addition to the family was as much an economic decision as a personal one. Henry and Fred worked as farm laborers alongside men Herman hired to help bring in the harvest, fix ailing machinery, and plow the fields.
By 1908, Henry was fourteen and felt a call to the ministry. He’d seen a man named Billy Sunday preach, and he was hooked.
Sunday, a former center fielder for the Chicago White Stockings, had quit the major leagues in the late nineteenth century to devote himself full time to ministry. After the turn of the century, he was leading outdoor tent revivals in small towns around the Midwest.
By 1910, “the baseball evangelist,” as he came to be known, was drawing thousands to his revivals. His populist preaching style enraged the clerical establishment, but charmed the rural masses. He was a tiger onstage, constantly prowling, never stopping for more than an instant, often jumping around or standing on chairs. One writer called him a “gymnast for Jesus.” The pace of his sermons—accelerating one moment, decelerating the next, all in the service of creating tension—kept audiences rapt, until the payoff line, when they would burst with laughter, rise to their feet in applause, or grab for the hand of a loved one nearby in heartbreak—whatever Sunday had intended.
Sunday’s message wasn’t new among evangelical Christians: the secular world is dangerous; alcohol is the devil; the Bible is the inerrant word of God; accept Jesus as your personal savior. But his vocabulary was filled with slang, his antics from the pulpit were hugely entertaining, and his conversion record was unmatched.
Thousands heeded Sunday’s altar calls over the weeks at any given revival. Between 1896 and 1907, Sunday mostly visited towns in Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Colorado. The towns where he set up his wooden tabernacles were mostly small: Leon and Exira, Iowa; Rantoul and Prophetstown, Illinois; Lima and East Liverpool, Ohio. “What he lacked in originality of ideas,” wrote one Sunday biographer, “he made up for with a fertility of expressive imagination and a talent for buffoonery which transcended the banality of his message.”
By 1917, Sunday was considered by many the “greatest revivalist in American history, perhaps the greatest since the days of the apostles.” Some said he was “the greatest preacher since John the Baptist.”
Billy Sunday may have inspired young Henry Gerecke to preach, but Henry’s father wasn’t about to make his path to the pulpit an easy one. Herman was dead against his oldest son having a career in the church, and Lena didn’t have much of a say in the matter. Herman told Henry he could be a farmer or a teacher. If Henry chose the latter, Herman said, he’d pay part of his tuition to the teacher’s college at nearby Southeast Missouri State.
Henry didn’t want to be a teacher, and he certainly didn’t want to farm. But his sense of loyalty and responsibility were strong, and he remained on the farm until he was nineteen years old. Finally, in 1912, he left Cape Girardeau and traveled west to the plains and the campus of St. John’s Academy and College in Winfield, Kansas.
His biggest problem there was money. Henry had no help from his father, so he landed a succession of jobs as he entered prep school—cleaning toilets and spittoons at a department store in nearby Wichita, and harvesting wheat as a farm laborer. Winfield, a college town of eight thousand residents, was populated mostly by retired farmers. The 1917–1918 St. John’s Bulletin, a promotional pamphlet selling the school to Lutheran parents, points out the town’s “many paved and well-shaded streets, neat cottages and lawns, splendid residences and electrical ‘white ways.’ ”
While plenty of trains came through Winfield—the Santa Fe, Southern Kansas, Florence–El Dorado, Frisco, Missouri Pacific—the town had no “railroad shops—which often bring an uncultured class of citizens.” The college was in east Winfield and connected to downtown by streetcar. The dormitory was a three-story stone building that slept 140 students and was “lighted with electricity, heated by steam” and “equipped with a modern vacuum-cleaning apparatus.”
Breakfast was from 6:30 A.M. to 6:50 A.M. (“Grace will be said at table, and general good order preserved.”) Morning study followed, from 7:00 A.M. to 7:45 A.M. After an inspection, classes commenced in the main hall. Aside from gatherings of the literary and musical organizations, vacant periods were to be devoted to study. “Lounging in the halls or expectorating in the building cannot be tolerated.” Attendance at morning and evening devotions was “considered self-evident” to aid in the development of “a truly Christian character.”
Devotions were at 10:15 A.M. and after dinner, which was at 5:30 or 6:00, depending on the season. A student could smoke in the studies, but not cigarettes, and only if he was seventeen years old and had the permission of his parents. He could not visit the picture shows or theaters, and “flirtations” were prohibited. “This includes all attentions to the other sex not called for by ordinary courtesy.”
St. John’s was a six-year prep school and college ministerial program for what would become the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, a place where young men who thought they might want to join the ministry came to earn their college degree before entering a graduate-level Lutheran seminary.
In 1847, a group of northern German immigrants to the United States had come together in Chicago to form the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States. Its goal was a network of churches that would preach and teach “confessional Lutheranism,” a traditionalist branch of the denomination that stressed a strict adherence to the Book of Concord, the sixteenth-century collection of authoritative documents, called confessions, that define the central doctrines of Lutheranism.
Pastors and congregations who wanted to join the new denomination were required to accept a document called the “Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the written Word of God and the only rule and norm of faith and practice.” It described the backbone of Protestantism: the notion of sola scriptura—that the biblical texts, not the dictates of the men who built the Catholic Church, contain the only infallible tenets of the Christian faith. Members also were required to accept all the symbolic books of the Lutheran Church “as a true and correct statement and exposition of the Word of God . . . the three Ecumenical Creeds, the Unaltered Augsburg Confession, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the Smalcald Articles, the Large Catechism of Luther, the Small Catechism of Luther, and the Formula of Concord.”
The core group that formed this new Lutheran branch had fled Germany in 1839 after the German government forced it to merge with Calvinists. The synod’s new constitution required new members to renounce “unionism”—worshipping with Christian clergy of other denominations—and “syncretism”—the fusion of different religions. Finally, new synod members had to agree to use “doctrinally pure agendas, hymnbooks, and catechisms.” On the denomination’s centennial, in 1947, the church changed its named to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.
During Gerecke’s years at St. John’s, the school held tight to its Saxon roots, largely because of instructions from Synod headquarters. The college imported textbooks from Germany so that Latin, Greek, and Hebrew could be taught in German rather than in English. Evening chapel services were conducted in German. Dormitory rules and report cards were issued in German. The local Lutheran church in Winfield offered services in German once a week. The students were given Reformation Day off.
The ministerial program was the main course at St. John’s, though it also offered a classical course that emphasized the languages, literature, and “the antiquities of Greece and Rome,” and a scientific course for students interested in mathematics and science. Young women could enroll at St. John’s and take business classes “and by close application soon become proficient in Shorthand, Typewriting and Bookkeeping.” Tuition was $1.00 per week and board was $90 per year. Books were $10 per year and expenses for “electric light” averaged twenty-
five cents per month. Laundry was “best sent home by parcel post.”
In the fall of Gerecke’s sophomore year of college at St. John’s, Wichita Natural Gas Co. struck oil in El Dorado, fifty miles north of the school. The well, Stapleton #1, led to the discovery of a massive oil field that covered thirty-four square miles and became the largest single-field producer of oil in the country. The El Dorado field created its own bustling business district with the population of Butler County nearly doubling between 1910 and 1920, which created plenty of jobs for starving college students—including Gerecke.
The one-dollar-per-week tuition expense didn’t apply to students in the ministerial course. Their tuition was paid by the synod with the understanding that “students who abandon the course are liable for full amount of back tuition.” Ministerial students concentrated on religion and languages, and graduates were admitted to the synod’s seminaries on the basis of their diplomas from St. John’s. “Such graduates,” the Bulletin promised, “if they have completed our full German course, will be able to use also the German fluently in the pulpit and in conversation.”
Gerecke started at St. John’s in 1913, at age twenty. In the high school, Gerecke took sacred literature, beginning Latin, ancient and medieval history, geometry, biology, and three units each of English and German. He got mostly Bs in English, rhetoric, and literature. He also got Bs in Hebrew, though he hated it. In German and Greek, he earned a mix of Bs and Cs. In Latin he fared better with Cicero (B/B-) than Virgil (B/C).
When he wasn’t working or studying, Gerecke had plenty of other distractions. He played basketball his freshman year, took part in the Student’s Mission Society, and was a member of the student council, rising to president of the student body and of the St. John’s Class of 1918. The St. John’s yearbook, The Saint, called him “the best man for the job.” But music was Gerecke’s true love—he played piano and violin at St. John’s, and his senior year quote, from George Eliot, underscored his devotion to it: “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” He played violin for the school’s Arion Quintet and sang in the Senior Octet, which performed often “spicy selections” during literary meetings and other public occasions. Gerecke was a founding member of the college orchestra and was its president all four years of college. The orchestra bought five pianos that it rented out to fund its concerts and The Saint proclaimed “the excellent success of this organization must largely be given to [Gerecke’s] credit.”