John Frederick Steinbruck (October 5, 1930 – March 1, 2015) was an ordained Lutheran minister who served for 28 years (1970–1997) as the senior pastor of Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. Luther Place is an historic, red-stone church located at Thomas Circle, 1226 Vermont Avenue, N.W., in the heart of Washington's red-light district. Less than a mile from the White House, the church sits between the symbols of world power and some of the nation's worst urban blight. As spiritual leader of Luther Place and what is now known as N Street Village, a diverse consortium of shelters and services for homeless women and their families, Steinbruck became an articulate and passionate preacher of the Social Gospel and a leading voice locally and nationally for the homeless, Central American refugees, and the victims of persecution and prejudice.
Steinbruck received many honors and much media recognition, and he was occasionally the instigator of controversy and acts of civil disobedience. To admirers, he was a "prophetic visionary" out to remake the world; to detractors, he was an "unbending, self-righteous true believer with a Messiah complex."
Early life and family
The son of working-class German immigrants, Steinbruck was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He suffered many health ailments as a child, including rickets, food allergies, a weak left eye and a hernia that required him to wear an iron truss, and his German heritage in the 1930s and 1940s subjected him to the very forms of prejudice he would later oppose in his Christian ministries. While growing up in Northeast Philadelphia, he attended Lawndale Elementary School, Wilson Junior High School, and Frankford High School, from which he graduated in 1948. An exceedingly thin child, at a young age he could not participate in competitive sports, though he would develop into a large, husky man with a football player's build. Steinbruck excelled at reading and developed into a good student, which would eventually lead him to college and post-graduate education. Following a two-year stint in the United States Navy, in 1949 and 1950, Steinbruck was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied at the Wharton School of Finance. He graduated from Penn in 1954 with a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering.
Early theological influences
By the summer of 1953, as a 22-year-old Penn student at the Wharton School of Finance, Steinbruck realized he did not fit into this "seminary for capitalists," as he would later call it. He was a man without direction, no sense of purpose, and casual faith. A bit of a hell-raiser, he frequented seedy bars and hustled money throwing darts. One afternoon, feeling down and out, having just ended an ill-fated romance, he walked into a corner drug store. There, among the trashy romance novels and magazines, was a single paperback copy of Out of My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer. The book cost him thirty-five cents. He would later say that it changed his life.
In Schweitzer, Steinbruck found an embodiment of moral virtue, a role model for a life of devoted service. Although Schweitzer enjoyed life as a philosopher, musician, and biblical scholar, he was plagued by "the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it." That so many people in the world were "denied that happiness by their material circumstances or their health" led Schweitzer, at the age of 30, to enroll in medical school. He would eventually build and re-build a hospital in Gabon, West Africa, and devote the remainder of his life caring to the medical needs of Africa's poor.
Steinbruck's spiritual search led him as well to Martin Wiznat, a Lutheran pastor in Philadelphia with a powerful speaking voice and a magnetism that engaged people, traits that would later be attributed to Steinbruck himself. Wiznat's theological world view was unlike any Steinbruck had ever heard. Steinbruck had been raised in the literalistic religion of his German immigrant parents, in a little known sect called the Faith Tract Mission. A pietistic movement, the Faith Tract Mission was a fundamentalist brand of Christianity that was in rebellion to the more formal, established Catholic and Lutheran churches of Europe. Steinbruck found it a religion of self-denial that encouraged a detachment from the world. Through his relationship and talks with Wiznat, Steinbruck "suddenly discovered," as he told the Washington Jewish Week in 1990, "that religion and faith could be respectable and did not require believing in three impossible things before breakfast every morning."