Problematic RV’s “Gaming” the System in Seattle

I mentioned last week the infamous Rat Pit in New York’s slums. Several Manhattan clergymen in 1868 rented it for two hours and tried to preach to the fans of battling rats. The New York Herald reported that the professionals preached over the heads of potential Water Street listeners: “What is wanted is a man of enthusiasm . . . rough language and homely bits of philosophy, who intuitively knows exactly the emotions which governs his hearers.”

Answering that call was Jerry McAuley, the son of a counterfeiter who abandoned his family. McAuley’s mother, unable to control her son, sent him off to other relatives. At age 19 the riotous drunkard and local bandit went to the state penitentiary for highway robbery. There, McAuley attended gospel meetings and read the Bible, a copy of which sat in every cell. When he got out, he repeatedly resolved to do better, only to fall back again and again. Finally, McAuley stayed straight and decided to help others on the streets “where I had always lived. I was used to the filth and felt sure I should be called to work for Jesus there.”

In 1872, McAuley rented a small Water Street room with funds provided by church leaders who admitted the failure of their plan to import middle-class ecclesiastical style into the Rat Pit. McAuley’s services were different than anything Water Street, or other mean streets, had seen. He invited in homeless men and others for cheap but hot food, and lots of hot stories. Tales of destitution and depravity were on the menu every night, but so was dessert — stories by McAuley and others of how God’s grace had changed their own lives. McAuley said men coming off the street “were a terrible degraded set, hungry and alive with vermin, but we looked beyond all that and saw only souls. Now and then God found a real jewel among them.”

The McAuley Mission grew. Night after night, in a narrow, stuffy hall, within four walls filled with New Testament verses, homeless felons and drunkards who had hit bottom gathered from 7:30 to 9:00 for hymns, a Bible reading, a short statement by McAuley, and then — the most exciting part of the evening — individual confessions and testimonies. A burglar told of his crimes and desire to change. A longshoreman, an engineer, a printer, and a steamship officer told their stories in frank language. A Dartmouth graduate turned alcoholic lawyer told of how he sank deeper until God transformed his life.

McAuley believed in challenge: He wanted each individual to recognize his own sin and need for the grace to change. One night a man stood and began praying, in a stereotyped way, for “the heathen,” for sinners everywhere, for everyone except himself. McAuley interrupted: “Look here, my friend, you had better ask God to have mercy on your soul.”

McAuley celebrated anniversaries: When a convert had stood fast for one year, he would lead the service and tell his story at length. One night Andy, a Scottish immigrant, celebrated his anniversary by admitting he had been a homeless alcoholic and gambler until one night he wandered into the mission, drunk. Then, he said, he came to believe that Jesus had died for him. He prayed to change, took a job as a cook, and was now reconciled with his family in Scotland, to which he planned to return shortly. McAuley emphasized such testimony, for he said that “those of us whom God has taken out of the dirty hole ought to be always telling of his goodness.”

Radical changes took place. Harvard’s William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, records the conversion at the mission of Samuel Hadley, an alcoholic who was overcome by guilt for his sins as he heard other testimonies, then fell to his knees as he realized that God still loved him. James recorded one telling fact: Hadley never drank again, and went on to become first the director of the Water Street Mission, and then of another mission that he opened himself.

This was all abnormal psychology according to James, explicable as a natural phenomenon. For McAuley, however, the cause of change among others was the same as his own: “I have been a great sinner, and have found Jesus a great Saviour.”

My historical work leads me to thank God for people like McAuley. My journalistic work gets me thinking about the now-deceased, McAuley-like Bob Cote in Denver, and many others now gone. As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m thankful for those who run the homeless shelters I’ve stayed at in California, Colorado, and Missouri. If you’re moved to do more, please check out the True Charity initiative at www.truecharity.us.