Life Themes: In His Steps

I read In His Steps, one of the bestselling books of all time, when I was just 13. I reread it this past weekend for the first time in over forty years in an attempt to discern why it has had such great and lasting impact on me.

Recently, Charles M. Sheldon's famous subtitle, "What Would Jesus Do," has become highly marketable as "WWJD", but Sheldon himself received little in royalties from his book and gave those all away to charity. As a pastor in Topeka, Kansas, he lived the book's message, supporting missions, launching Bible study groups and outreaches, and championing reforms such as better housing for the poor, job training and placement, prison reform, improvement of schools, and pacifism. As a university freshman, he started a Sunday School for Chinese laundrymen, teaching them English by reading the Bible.

He also founded some of the first kindergartens in America, one in a destitute community of freed slaves and their children outside of Topeka. Among those kindergarteners, Elisha Scott grew up to be a respected attorney. His son, Charles Sheldon Scott, also a lawyer, argued the winning side of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court the year before I was born.

But all this about Sheldon's life I have learned only in recent days. While highly inspiring, it contributed nothing to making the message of In His Steps part of my life theme.

The fictional story, written in the style of its day, 1897, is wooden for modern readers, often pedantic, perhaps because he wrote it first as a sermon series. The story line follows a pastor and congregation who resolve to ask themselves whenever they have a decision to make, "What would Jesus do?"

Sheldon did not prescribe how everyone should live out this principle. "There could be no fixed Christian way of doing money," he wrote. "The rule that regulated use [of money] was unselfish utility." Each disciple of Christ was to find his or her own way in living out the pledge, but there was no doubt that such a commitment would affect every area of life including the economic. It is obvious that Sheldon anticipated that, as people adopted and lived out his pledge, it would result in "a perfect upheaval of Christianity, as we now know it."

He repeatedly attacked the exploitation of the poor in the promotion of prize fights and the sale of alcohol, arguing that such corporate greed be fought at every level including the economic, corporate and legal. For him, prohibition is a fight against the sin of corporate greed as much as of personal drunkenness. As one of his characters prays, "O Lord, how long shall Christian people continue to suffer by their silence and their ballots the greatest form of slavery known in America?"

His wealthy characters who took the pledge challenged their own "luxurious class" to repent of class elitism and the wanton use of money. It was not enough for the wealthy to devote their money to God. "Men would give money who would not think of giving themselves....They gave what was the easiest to give, what hurt them the least." At this Sheldon was only warming up. "The Christianity that attempts to suffer by proxy," he wrote, "is not the Christianity of Christ."

As his characters live out the pledge, they become devoted to developing better housing for the poor, good wages for employees, education for all children, industries more conducive to justice and compassion, food preparation training, and job training and development for the poor. Moreover the book sets as a goal the reform of journalism, the transformation of the political system itself so filled with greed and corruption, and the expression of the Christian mission in all walks of life.

Sheldon's emphasis on humanitarianism, compassion and justice are firmly grounded in his devotion to Christ. "I cannot interpret the probable action of Jesus until I know better what His Spirit is...We must know Jesus before we can imitate him." He believes that "the Christian of our time must represent a more literal imitation of Jesus, and especially the element of suffering."

That Christians must enter into the suffering of others as Jesus did is a dominant theme. "Christian America! Is it a reproach on the form of our discipleship that the exhibition of actual suffering for Jesus on the part of those who walk in His steps always provokes astonishment as at the sight of something very unusual?" The "Christian" America of his day was highly steeped in a cultural Christianity in which neither the faith nor the citizenship reflected the true Gospel.

Sheldon puts great emphasis on a spiritual baptism, that this effort to reach and reform is not something to be done purely by human effort. He petitions over and over again "for spiritual baptism within the church in America such as it had never known." As a student of history, I am intrigued, for it was but three years later that the modern Pentecostal movement was birthed in the very same city of Topeka. Sadly the American church was to splinter over the next decade into three strands, each taking an aspect of Sheldon's message with it. With Modernism would go his emphasis on social justice, with Fundamentalism would go his devotion to Christ, and with the Pentecostal movement would go his emphasis on the Holy Spirit. All three had been part of the galvanized wing of the latter 19th Century Evangelicalism, but his book heralded the end and not the beginning of such a unity.

So how did this book influence my life theme? Hard to say, except that I spent the next twenty years in research and writing, trying to discover how and why those three strands had splintered and could not even now be brought back together again.