I associate Hell’s Kitchen with a cooking show. It’s also a chain of restaurants. But did you know Hell’s Kitchen was a real place? Davy Crockett (who knew?) coined the phrase in connection with a New York City slum.
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) converted to Christ after a rebellious adolescence. His first assignment after seminary was serving Second German Baptist Church in NYC, a church of recent German immigrants. His church bordered a slum in Midtown Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen. He witnessed the dark side of industrialization with its accompanying low wages, long hours, no health insurance or retirement benefits. He observed that the working poor, regardless of how hard they toiled, were unable to rise above subsistence level. What really tugged at him was conducting children’s funerals, victims of malnutrition and dangerous jobs. His friends urged him to give up his social work for “Christian work.” He insisted social work is Christ’s work. He later taught at Rochester Theological Seminary yet never lost his pastoral heart. He wrote, “It is no longer my fond hope to be a learned theologian and write big books. I want to be a pastor…preaching to them Christ as the man in whom their affections and energies can find the satisfaction for whom mankind is groaning.”
Labor Day began in 1882 in New York City as a parade to honor working people. Congress passed a law in 1894 making the first Monday in September a legal holiday. Walter compiled a prayer book for working people, For God and the People. He prayed for the unemployed “who seek honest work in vain,” for women in low paying factory jobs “to be saved from the terrors of utter want,” for immigrants “in a country dedicated to liberty, that they do not find old oppressions” and for children “bowed beneath the yoke of toil.”
One evening prayer from his prayer book for working people follows here: