William Passavant (1821-1894) was walking down Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh when he was met by a Presbyterian minister, “Brother Passavant, you must come with me to a noonday prayer meeting! We are having the most glorious meetings! Come along and enjoy them!” William, a Lutheran pastor, smiled and said, “Really, you must excuse me. I have so many sick Presbyterians at the hospital that it keeps me busy looking after them.” It was a merited rebuke to the oldest, richest church in Western Pennsylvania which had not a single hospital or orphanage in the region. While William Passavant was no stranger to prayer meetings, he also believed it was necessary to act on our prayers. As he said in a sermon, “The gospel must be lived as well as told, or men will disregard it as an idle dream.”
One biographer observed that wherever William saw a need, he tried to meet it. He started homes for children left orphaned by the Civil War and a school for children of freed slaves. He originated hospitals in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee in response to the scourge of deadly epidemics. When he was still a young man, publishing a Lutheran newspaper in Baltimore, he received an urgent appeal to lead a floundering Lutheran church in Pittsburgh. He wrestled with the decision of whether to accept the call to this church “in the west.” His journal provides a window into his ambivalence as evidenced by mailing his acceptance letter and then promptly retrieving it from the post office. Despite his ambivalence, God wonderfully answered his journal prayer: