CENTRAL CITY: With its Lutheran status unsure, the ministry keeps the light shining on its flock.

11:29 PM PST on Saturday, April 16, 2005

By GREGOR McGAVIN / The Press Enterprise

The dozen or so men who had called an oaken pew their bed overnight were still wiping sleep from bleary eyes and patting down haystack hair when morning services began at Central City Lutheran Mission.

Bedrolls and spare clothes sat bundled in the aisles. Watery sunlight shone through glass-stained windows, displaying the colors of the rainbow. A single candle burned beside an altar set up for communion on the painted concrete floor.

"May the Lord be with you," the Rev. David Kalke said, starting the Mass.

"And also with you," the men mumbled back.

The call-and-response was an age-old part of the service, but it couldn't have been more timely.

The downtown San Bernardino mission and its pastor are near a break with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over its refusal to let practicing homosexuals minister.

The mission's fight with the Lutheran hierarchy is the latest skirmish in a nationwide battle over the ordination of gays and lesbians. It's a melee that has pitted Kalke and Central City against officials at the Orange County-based synod that has authority over more than 100 congregations.

It's also a fight that has the flock worried about its shepherd, in a reversal of roles. The homeless, poor and otherwise troubled souls who find help at this ministry say they are just as concerned for Kalke and his mission as he always has been for them.

"This place has been so good to me," said Robert Newhouse, who found a home at Central City after a two-year prison term for drugs that cost him his house, his family and his life savings. "But if I can do it (survive), I think they can do it."

For nearly a decade, Central City and its pastor have brought light to one of the darkest enclaves in the Inland area. And the people who have found help and hope there -- givers and receivers alike -- say they might not find their way without the mission.

People Others Never See

It was in December 1996 that the mission opened on the site of a shuttered Lutheran church that had failed to fit in with a neighborhood grown increasingly black and Hispanic, low-income and high-crime.

Kalke arrived that June from New York, where he spent 21 years in urban ministry, a special calling within the church to tend to the poor, racially diverse residents of inner cities, and he was interviewing for a job as the new mission's pastor. He didn't expect to take the job.

Then he saw the neighborhood.

Wrought-iron and chain-link fences bordered cracked sidewalks in the blocks around 13th and G streets. There were drugs, gangs, graffiti. What little business was being done was mostly illegal.

Kalke had a vision.

Here was an ideal chance to reach out to those too often overlooked by society and by the church -- the poor, the abused, the addicted. He would build a mission based on word, sacrament and service, offering spiritual and earthly assistance to people held back by the color of their skin, their own mistakes or bad luck.

Central City would serve the people others in the church never see.

"The issues that our people face here are life and death issues," he would say later, "and a lot of the church doesn't deal with those issues."

The mission's first outreach to the community was a food pantry. Among the mothers who showed up for free groceries, Kalke found a dozen with teenage sons. He recruited the 12 teens to help in his ministry, like apostles.

In the nine years since it opened, Central City has started programs to help people in nearly all aspects of their lives -- a role that makes it unique within the church, even among urban ministries.

The mission's winter shelter, where as many as 70 men spend the night, is one of the only places in the Inland area where single men can a find a place to sleep out of the cold.

Each morning the men are free to stay for services.

There is a subsidized housing program for more than a dozen people living with HIV and AIDS and a medical clinic that serves the low-income community and trains nursing students from nearby universities. There's an after-school program that gives kids a safe place to go and housing for young men who might otherwise be unable to attend college.

Central City works with different divisions and commissions within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Lutheran seminaries to create, fund and staff such programs .

Its combination of social services and sacraments have been emulated elsewhere in the church. And the scope of services offered at the mission -- through housing, nutritional, medical, educational, spiritual, after-school, parenting and other programs -- is umatched by local secular organizations.

Central City is "certainly a very different model (of mission) and one that we were very excited about," said Bishop Murray Finck, who heads the synod to which the mission belongs.

Outside the sanctuary on Tuesday mornings there is a food pantry. Folding metal chairs are set up in the parking lot. Piles of clean clothes and loaves of sliced bread occupy long tables in the mission's courtyard. The dozens who gather take what they need.

"We'd probably starve without the mission," Kim Eckley said on a recent morning.

Eckley, 37, lives nearby, just off Eighth Street. She is epileptic and unable to work. The $805 monthly disability checks she gets don't stretch far, and she makes the rounds of food pantries and soup kitchens each day.

She starts at Central City.

"When we're out of food, we just come here," she said.

'Peace Be With You'

Halfway through the morning service, the prayers stop and the congregants embrace.

Kalke, a rail-thin man in a black frock, hugs them one by one.

"Peace be with you," he says each time.

Of the dozen men who found sanctuary inside the mission the night before, some are young and used to crashing on couches or wherever they can. On the older men, the strain of hard times is starting to show.

It's a far different crowd than one would find in Orange County, where the Pacifica Synod to which Central City belongs is based. Here there is no official church membership and no church council.

"These people here are our congregation, as opposed to having 100 people come from outside on Sunday," says Karen Bolton, a seminary student from Chicago who has come to learn urban ministry at the mission and helps with the services.

Bolton, who is to be ordained as a pastor this summer, said she thinks Central City's work should be copied by other congregations and carried out nationwide.

Despite its works, the mission and its pastor have run into trouble recently.

Both Central City and Kalke were relieved of their official roles within the Lutheran church in October for refusing to withdraw their appointment of an openly lesbian associate pastor. The Rev. Jenny Mason has since resigned, and Kalke and members of the church's board of directors have met with Finck in hopes of a reconciliation.

Finck lauds the work of the mission, but says all Lutheran entities must abide by church policies, which do not allow the ordination of practicing homosexuals.

"I never questioned the work they're (Central City) doing," the bishop said. "But the church has governing principles that are decided upon by the entire denomination."

For Kalke, the right thing is the only thing to do, whether that means giving food to the hungry or speaking out against a church rule that he feels discriminates against devoted ministers who are gay or lesbian. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will one day accept gay and lesbian ministers, he believes. That change will likely come in 10 to 15 years -- and only if Central City and others are willing to stand up for it within the church.

Kalke has spoken of leading the mission away from the church, possibly turning it into a nonprofit organization. Central City has built up enough of a fund-raising network to make that a possibility, he says.

In Kalke's cluttered office behind the church sanctuary, religious tracts in English and Spanish are stacked in a bookshelf. A well-thumbed health reference text occupies a desk chair. Among the portraits of Jesus and the saints on a back wall is a picture of Malcolm X, the slain Nation of Islam leader who advocated civil rights "by any means necessary."

Finck said many Lutherans think a new policy on homosexual ministry may emerge from a national church conference in August in Orlando, Fla. One proposal put forward last week by a church council in Chicago would allow for exceptions on the local level. Bishops would have the option of asking church leaders on a case-by-case basis to allow practicing gays or lesbians to minister within their synod.

It would be unwise to burn any bridges before that and other proposals are weighed in August, the bishop said. Whether Central City wants to remain part of the church is, he said, "a decision that every congregation that finds itself challenging the position of our denomination makes.

"Our decision has not stopped them from doing their work," Finck said. "Without the congregational status that was revoked, they no longer have to adhere to the governing principles that other congregations are called on to follow."

Kalke and members of the mission board of directors' executive council last month began a series of meetings with Finck aimed at a reconciliation. Kalke said reinstatement of himself and the mission on the official church rolls were not discussed, but were expected to be in coming months.

'God's Wish'

The service ends, and the men start to drift out of the sanctuary and away from the mission.

Some will go to work at jobs the mission helped them find. Others will seek out a doctor or some other way to straighten out their lives. Many likely will be back next winter, when the shelter reopens after closing in May.

Newhouse, clad in a paint-spattered black sweat shirt, is off to work with the maintenance crew at the mission, where he has lived for a year now in a staff dormitory. And Kalke is back to his job of caring for a neighborhood.

As he's leaving, someone asks Newhouse if he thinks the mission will make it.

"I think that is God's wish," he says.

Reach Gregor McGavin at (909) 806-3069 or gmcgavin@pe.com .