William Passavant Created Services to Help the Poor and Sick
Passavant created social agencies for America's Lutheran church.
“THE CHURCH is not merely a sheepfold, but a workshop,” William Passavant asserted. Love must take practical forms, he believed, and so this Lutheran pastor took to heart Christ’s command to love all people. Perhaps his mother’s influence was seen in this, for when he was a child, she had often sent him on errands of mercy.
Passavant had studied at Gettysburg Seminary under Samuel Schmucker, who advocated a kind of Lutheranism that departed from the old confessions. Passavant was at first swept along, but later fellow-pastor and theologian Charles Porterfield Krauth persuaded him there was still value in those confessions. Passavant edited a monthly periodical titled the Missionary, which spread conservative Lutheran theology as well as advocating charity. He also helped found the Pittsburgh Synod along confessional lines. However, his real contribution was to social services.
Although always short of money, he opened colleges, hospitals, immigrant stations, libraries, orphanages, and Sunday schools. He organized the first deaconess work in the United States. In every case, he prayed for whatever money the work needed believing that fund-raising appeals and financial gimmicks dishonored God. Whether the stock market plunged or deadly diseases like yellow fever swept America, he went on with his tasks. Often he worked in the teeth of opposition from Christians who were afraid his patients would spread infection to their communities, or who resented him because his godliness showed them how shallow their own professions of faith were.
His work went on late into the night. Then, while others slept, he prayed. Sometimes it seemed his prayers were in vain. Once when need was desperate, he went out hoping to solicit a donation for food and supplies. “The Lord will provide,” he promised his assistants. However, he returned not with money, but with another fever victim. “The Lord has not sent us money,” he said, “but he has sent us one of his people to be cared for.”
When he was seventy-three, Passavant caught a severe cold traveling home from a funeral. For a week he struggled to keep working, but died on this day 3 June 1894. Afterward, people looked back with amazement on all that he had done. The many helping agencies he had founded became the nucleus of the Lutheran Services Organization, the largest church social program in the United States.
A United Presbyterian magazine summed up his life: “In the forms of philanthropic work in which the Protestant Churches in this country have been altogether neglectful—the providing of institutions for the care of the sick, suitable homes for orphans and for aged servants of God—he was a pioneer.”
—Dan Graves
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Among the Christian disciplines is service. Celebration of Discipline goes into that. Watch at RedeemTV.
[Celebration of Discipline can be purchased at Vision Video]
And Christian History #101, Healthcare and Hospitals in the Mission of the Church, shows how Christians have cared for the sick from the faith's earliest days.
