The man had reached the open space in front of the pulpit and had turned about facing the people. . . .

. . . “I was wondering as I sat there under the gallery, if what you call following Jesus is the same thing as what He taught. What did He mean when He said: ‘Follow me!’ ”

In the course of his story, Sheldon presents a dozen or so answers to his big question: Give up a concert career to sing for evangelistic services. Print only the news that’s fit. Become a corporate whistle-blower. Preach against the saloon. For a well-to-do minister and his bishop, this commitment to following Christ means resigning their high-status positions to live and work among the urban poor in a “social settlement.” While the term “social settlement” is probably translated by the contemporary reader as “soup kitchen” or “rescue mission,” Sheldon referred to a movement with its own history, heroes, and goals.

The Settlement House movement was driven by middle-class young people who, like Sheldon, were interested in finding the right thing to do, then doing it. This impulse led them to inner-city neighborhoods and the practical issues of loving their neighbors. Whether all the settlement workers intended to, or succeeded, in following the steps of Christ, the movement was Charles Sheldon’s own answer to his big question, and one worth recalling today as the still-compelling question of In His Steps rings in our own hearts.

The background of the Settlement House movement is the Industrial Revolution: a world transformed overnight by machines, mass-producing problems hitherto unknown in scale and kind. Smoke-belching factories, immigrants working long hours for low wages in dangerous conditions, people living in overcrowded, stinking, disease-ridden slums, cities run by corrupt and inefficient bosses created an alien, impersonal, and increasingly artificial world.

In 1884, an Anglican clergyman in the London slums, Samuel Barnett, introduced a group of restless students to the needs of his own parish in the first settlement house, Toynbee Hall. Barnett’s idea was simple: university men would live in the slums “as an outpost of education and culture,”[1] cooperating across class lines to bring about social reform. The idea spread, and by 1911, there were forty-six social settlements in Britain.[2]

The settlement idea really took off in the New World, which had many Old World problems and millions of their newly arrived people. In 1886, a group of students and leaders opened what became “University Settlement” on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jane Addams visited Toynbee House and came home to open what became the most famous settlement, Hull House, on Chicago’s West Side. Within ten years—by the time of In His Steps—there were seventy-four settlements in the U.S.; by 1900, over one hundred, and by 1910 over four hundred.[3]

The sort of people attracted to settlement work were usually young, middle-class, educated, and unmarried. Where the residents differed was in motivations and goals: there were socialists, utopians, anarchists, and Christians. Many were looking for an escape, a way to feel useful, a sense of excitement.

A settlement house was nothing if not exciting, typically found in a run-down mansion in a slum: “It was often the only house with flower boxes and a brass plate on the door; and it usually had a stream of children moving in and out.”[4] The settlements were centers for action and intellectual stimulation, “like a misplaced fraternity”:[5] a constant flow of writers and social activists fired late-night discussions and a sense that here was the center of the world—a world that might be changed.

Despite a share of avowed secularists, the majority of settlement workers were, in varying degrees, religiously motivated: “the decision to live in the slums was somehow related to the desire to apply the Christian idea of service to the new challenges and the new problems of the city.”[6] The Christian workers often considered themselves part of the larger stream of “the Social Gospel movement.” Following the Civil War, many believers felt both an acute awareness of industrialism’s ills and a sense of the church’s responsibility to do something about them.

Though Hull House was a nonsectarian settlement, a broad spectrum of churches quickly “adapted the [settlement] idea to their own uses”[7]—Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, and Jews. In Pittsburgh, Kingsley House (1893), run by young Episcopalian minister George Hodges, was avowedly religious, as was East Side House (1891) in New York.

Charles Sheldon, profoundly influenced by the settlement idea, ministered to poor blacks in racist Kansas with extensive educational and cultural projects, including a kindergarten. Sheldon’s main focus was an African American section of Topeka called Tennesseetown. In this, Sheldon was far ahead of his time, even more progressive than the mainstream settlements. Sheldon was long on practice—in effect, the Jane Addams of Topeka—but short on theory. His theology boiled down to doing what he thought Jesus would do.

Chicago Commons (1894), a religious settlement house in Chicago, was frequented by Charles Sheldon. He wrote of the Commons, “my first thought of the character of the ‘Bishop’ in In His Steps was suggested to me there.”[8] Graham Taylor, another Congregationalist minister, had accepted a professorship at a local seminary on the condition he be permitted to open this settlement. Taylor was definitely “can do”: teacher, preacher, social worker, and ardent reformer, he devoted himself to “the application of Christianity to common life and its social conditions.”[9] He emphasized a personal faith, describing the settlement as “the home of a group of people who want to share the life of the neighborhood . . . as little of an organization and as much of a personal relationship as it can be made.”[10] The Commons was a rarity among settlements, including as it did families among singles in residence. Among these were Taylor’s wife and children.

Sharing the life of the neighborhood was the key to the settlement houses’ developing vision. Dispensing art and culture was quickly supplemented by the task of meeting more obviously pressing needs: providing child care, kindergartens, and classes for adults— homemaking, parenting, vocational training, and the English language for immigrants. Workers who saw children playing in streets and alleys every day began to campaign for city parks, and helped create the first public playgrounds.

But the path led deeper still—to the economic and political roots of certain social problems. Hull House residents were astonished one Christmas when local children refused offered candy, till they learned the children worked long hours in a candy factory.[11] Workers investigated living and factory conditions; they gathered statistics about child labor, housing, tuberculosis, and documented the circumstances that drove young women into prostitution. Jane Addams found herself riding with the garbage trucks, mapping their routes and keeping notes on their performance. (She eventually got herself elected garbage inspector for her ward.) Settlement workers aroused public opinion, teaching their neighbors to demand more from those running for political office.

Clashes with local powers taught settlement workers that “any attempt to improve working and living conditions involved them in politics.”[12] They pressured city government for better sanitation services and housing regulation. They campaigned for cleaner streets and the elimination of patronage, against gambling and the sale of pornography. Settlement workers sat on school boards, committees, and organizations on behalf of children, women, and families. They attacked starvation wages and unsafe working conditions, defended organized labor, and on occasion helped arbitrate labor disputes.

Despite their obvious potential for good works, settlements were criticized by foes of the Social Gospel and by those who dismissed the workers as dreamers, socialists, and anarchists. Traditional charities viewed settlements as reckless upstarts. There was truth in much of the criticisms. Yet what could not be dismissed as easily was the need that brought the settlements to the cities, nor the inaction of many of the critics in the face of that need. And whatever their missteps, settlements often came up with innovative solutions.

More than any preaching, more than any religious talking, more than any institution, is needed in the “slums” of the cities of this land the incarnation of God’s spirit in human lives and hearts living the Christ-life of love and human service toward fellow-men. To be in any real sense successful, the settlement in every word and thought and act must repeat and exemplify to the limit of ability the divine method—the Word must again become flesh, and dwell among men.

As the twenties roared, the settlement scene commenced slow fade-out. In some ways, the job seemed done. Many causes had been won —the eight-hour day, improved work conditions. Much of the homemaking and vocational training was taken over by public schools. Settlement house workers had founded the NAACP. The investigations and statistic-gathering had been handed over to professional journalists and sociologists.

But setbacks, including the movement’s ill-fated alliances with various political ideologies, began piling up after World War I. The Supreme Court managed to reject a much-hoped-for national child labor law. Add to this the weariness of seeing neighborhoods change, but not improve. Though the immigrants seemed to have been assimilated, the new poor were African Americans come to cities during the war. The Settlement movement as a whole was not prepared to cope with racism.

Finally, there was a change of attitude. The new generation of settlement worker was often critical of the older, sometimes haphazard, ways, even challenging “the idea that residence was indispensable.”[13] Many workers now preferred living in suburban neighborhoods, no longer remaining at the settlement for evening meetings, seeing “no value in the settlement workers’ gathering around the dinner table at night with the head worker mixing the salad.”[14] Inevitably, workers came to view the people in the neighborhood less as neighbors than clients. “Looking at settlement work as a job, they tried consciously to make their work professional.”[15] But whatever settlement work gained in professionalism, it seemed to have lost something else.

And so the settlement legacy is mixed. The perspective of an entire generation was changed because of their experience in making neighbors of the poor. The lives of many of those neighbors were made better because they lived near a settlement, and in turn many made their own positive impact. Among the former students of the kindergarten run by Charles Sheldon was Elisha Scott, who later became a prominent attorney, as did Scott’s son, Charles Sheldon Scott, who argued the winning side in the landmark desegregation case Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954.[16] Many of the reforms urged by settlements, from child labor to food and drug regulation, are today so mainstream that it’s hard to believe they were once hotly contested issues.

Yet it was the protracted fights for, and at times overreliance on, legislative solutions which helped draw the settlement workers’ energies from the neighborhoods. Likewise, in their efforts to be all things to all men, the religious settlements and the Social Gospel movement diluted their Christian identity until it became irrelevant.

The eventual exhaustion of the settlement impulse suggests that a movement needs more than just a “can-do” spirit to keep moving. This was the conclusion of settlement leader Clarence Gordon of East Side House: “Humanitarians, socialists, philanthropists, may do settlement work and do it well . . . [B]ut only on the foundation of Christ . . . and His example, and grace to inspire and direct, can the settlement realize its highest possibilities.”[17] The surest foundation for social action is not utopian zeal, nor simple pity, and certainly not the hope of success. The most durable motivation for loving one’s neighbor, in the long run, is the same as loving one’s spouse: obedience to God.

One hundred years after In His Steps, postindustrial America faces urban and other social problems unimaginable to nineteenth-century optimists: among these, a “permanent underclass” with millions of children growing up in poverty, drugs, violence, dysfunctional families. Many of the worst urban statistics are on the rise: “no parent” households, child abuse, illiteracy, suicides, gang membership, juvenile crime—including murder.

The enthusiasm surrounding recent calls by Colin Powell and others for volunteers to reach out to at-risk kids is encouraging. New evidence proves conclusively that the personal touch, as in mentoring programs, can actually make a difference. Whether Powell’s Volunteer Summit creates enough excitement to send a new generation of workers into the cities remains to be seen. At this end of the twentieth century the community spirit, along with faith in “Progress,” has been replaced by cynicism, xenophobia, and cybertechnology designed to keep the ugly world at bay.

Yet cutting through the buzzing of a century’s worth of distractions, through our own insulated hearts, one question still rings: What would Jesus do?

Christians haven’t always agreed on how to answer that question. But there has never been much debate that Jesus would do something. Nor has there been much debate that those who take the name of Christ are implicated in responsibility for others.

And the first step in His steps can hardly be debated: imitating Christ means leaving the safety of the speculative heavenlies and living one’s faith in a concrete social context. God revealed himself in the history of a particular people; Christ is the revelation of God in man, Word in flesh. Indeed, many theologians warn that the only effective evangelism in our postmodern age is this sort of incarnational orthodoxy.

Charles Sheldon followed Christ in putting the Word into social action. And like Jesus, Sheldon drew large crowds by embedding truth in a narrative, a “story-sermon,” such as In His Steps, which itself is a call to incarnate one’s faith. To subvert an old anarchist slogan, he lived the “Propaganda of the deed.”

Those who’ve been cut to the quick by that Big Question of In His Steps should consider Charles Sheldon answered it with a settlement house. And while the Settlement movement eventually foundered on its often vague, even questionable, ends, it remains an impressive model of a means for fulfilling the end of Matthew 25: feeding, clothing, and caring for “the least of these.” For Evangelicals, who spent much of the last century debating the balance between theology and social action, this passage of Scripture is a reminder that the final division is not between faith and works, theory and practice, but between sheep and goats.

And so the question still rings, from the last century on into the next: “What would Jesus do?”

Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps (Springdale, Pa.: Whitaker House, 1979), 11, 12.

John Palmer Gavit, “The Story of a Settlement: Chicago Commons, Its Origin, Growth, and Institutional Work,” The Treasury: A Christian Magazine 15, no. 3 (July 1897): 182-183.

1. Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (1967; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 6. [return]

2. Davis, 8. [return]

3. Ibid., 12. [return]

4. Ibid., 26. [return]

5. Ibid., 31. [return]

6. Ibid., 29. [return]

7. Ibid., 14. [return]

8. Charles M. Sheldon, “Work with Humanity at First Hand— Impressions of Chicago Commons,” Commons 5 (Dec. 1900): 6-7, quoted in Louise C. Wade, Graham Taylor: Pioneer for Social Justice, 1851-1938 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Also note: “[Rev. Sheldon’s] fraternal participation in our Tuesday evening meeting, Brotherhood Conference, household vespers, and table-talk have constituted him a non-resident member of the inner fellowship at the Commons.” Chicago Commons: A Monthly Record of Social Settlement Life and Work 1, no. 8 (Nov. 1896): 6). “I have had the honor of several times of residence in the Chicago Commons. I do not know just what my official position is there, because once I stayed several days in the Commons as an observer, and once I went there to rest. (I advise only persons in vigorous health to try this plan of getting rested.) But I am sure no work has ever appealed to me like that which Professor Taylor is doing.” Charles M. Sheldon, Chicago Advance, 12 May 1898. [return]

9. Graham Taylor, letter, 11 Aug. 1892, Graham Taylor Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill. [return]

10. Graham Taylor, address at dedication of Chicago Commons, “Chicago Commons: Social Settlement of the Chicago Seminary, 140 North Union Street, Oct. 20, 1894,” Graham Taylor Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill. [return]

11. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (n.p.: Signet Classic, 1910), 148. [return]

12. Davis, 148. [return]

13. Ibid., 232. [return]

14. Ibid. [return]

15. Ibid. [return]

16. Timothy Miller, Following in His Steps: A Biography of Charles M. Sheldon (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1987), 52. [return]

17. Davis, 14. [return]

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 26, Issue 112 (1997), p. 39-40, 42
© 1997 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.