Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church, by Harvard resident Jedediah Mannis, is the story of Mannis’ call to ministry—outdoor ministry to the dispossessed. To read the book is to be forced to look at homeless people, really look at them, and to be inspired by the work of this man and others of his church who have dedicated themselves to bringing these people together in Christian love.

“Sometimes it is so terrible out there that I can’t even talk about it,” says Mannis.

But in his book he does talk about it, with honesty, humility, conviction, and compassion, in vivid detail and affecting imagery.

Mannis describes a bitterly cold day about 10 years ago when a fall on a Boston sidewalk catapulted him into a wholly different life. For 30 years he had been an attorney, specializing in protecting open space; that day he began the journey that would lead him to Harvard Divinity School and to his ordination as a minister. When he got up from the sidewalk, he looked into the face of a homeless man and truly saw him. The man did not look back, but this incident was the catalyst for Mannis to act on “signals” in his adult life that had been guiding him toward a different vocation.

“The call had been there for a long while, but I didn’t recognize it as a call,” says Mannis. In college he had learned about faith as mission: “Yale encouraged a muscular form of religious activism.” This belief would frame a ministry 30 years later.

Mannis’ previous awareness of the homeless was crystallized in an image of a woman he had encountered in Grand Central Station, wrapped in a filthy blanket below which poked out socked feet, trying to get out of an alcove but pinned there by a relentless stream of passersby. On that day Mannis, too, had walked on by. But now he felt called to stop. As a member of King’s Chapel in Boston, Mannis knew that it supported an outdoor church for the homeless. He began to offer legal help pro bono at the church’s services. The irony of a real estate lawyer providing services to the homeless did not escape him. In time he realized that “I was as much a minister who happened to be trained as a lawyer as I was a lawyer who wanted to help homeless people.” He decided to become an ordained minister and start an outdoor church in Cambridge.

In his commitment to outdoor ministry to the homeless, Mannis found an inspiration in a Unitarian minister working in Boston in the early 19th century. His story of the Outdoor Church of Cambridge is “viewed through the prism of the life, thought and ministry of the Rev. Joseph Tuckerman.” Tuckerman’s outdoor ministry was radical—he ignored church, social distinction, and political imperatives in his “single-minded pursuit of love for the unlikeable.”

Mannis relates to Tuckerman on a personal level. He notes that Tuckerman, like himself, came late in his life to this particular ministry. Rather than retire after 25 years as minister to a Chelsea church, Tuckerman accepted the mission to minister to the poor. Mannis admires Tuckerman for his ability to ponder new ideas and embrace new experiences at a time of life when most people are avoiding such challenges. He admires his grounding of theology in his actual experience and his courage and integrity in acting on those understandings. In reading Mannis’ book, I came to have the same kind of admiration for Mannis that he expresses for Tuckerman.

The Outdoor Church had its first services on the Cambridge Common about five years ago, near the Civil War monument, where granite benches line the perimeter of a cobblestone apron around the monument. Mannis and other members of the clergy wear collars and distinctive crosses made of bronze. Mannis asserts that “we are a church, not a service agency.” They did not set out to end homelessness or even to affect the material lives of the people they serve. They seek “to enhance the spiritual life of those who, for whatever reasons, cannot go inside a church. Theologically speaking, we try to assure our people that we love them regardless of whether they get ‘better’ or not. We will not love them the less if they don’t stop drinking or don’t stop beating up other homeless people.”

Joseph Tuckerman and the Outdoor Church, Wipf and Stock publishers, September 2009; 242 pages; retail price $27.

Since that beginning on Cambridge Common, the Outdoor Church has spread to services in Porter Square, and every Sunday it sees 90 to 100 chronically homeless people. In addition to the prayer services, the church performs ministry-at-large in both Harvard and Central Squares, distributing sandwiches, socks, and toiletries. The Outdoor Church is ecumenical, and its underlying principle is to bring together a community in love of God and of each other.

Descriptions of this “community” dominate the book. We meet men and women who cannot change their lives, lives given to alcohol, mental illness, and violence. We meet Wendy, who has a round, flat pale face and who sometimes stands in the middle of the street and screams at drivers; Henry, who lost fingers to frostbite a few years ago when he passed out on the street; Irving, whose legs are swollen and discolored but who refuses to see a doctor. We know about the physical appearance and the actions of these people, but we know little about their lives, their pasts, or their inner selves. That is because Mannis himself doesn’t know those things; it is enough to know each of them as a member of the covenanted community.

Mannis acknowledges that the hardest thing to accept is the domestic abuse among the homeless. Many couples in the church continually abuse one another, one couple even periodically renting a motel room so that this can occur. Difficult as it is, the church must hold the abuser as well as the abused within the covenanted community in the conviction that that is the only way in which “all can be healed.” Death is a constant reality. Mannis talks about Rick, emaciated, refusing to eat: “Death is leering at me over your shoulder, Rick. And all I have with me is faith and a pair of socks.” Mannis loses a piece of himself every time he leaves Rick and others like him, compelling personalities who will not help themselves to live. Mannis talks often of the clergy, interns, and volunteers who work with him as a team, for no one person could remain open to the unremitting degradation and suffering without constant support. For each other, they are the “balm” for much of the pain.

The book has lingered with me. I am moved by Mannis’ story of how in his fifties he so drastically changed his life to minister to the most unlovable of human beings. I found it interesting to learn about Tuckerman and his work with the poor in Boston and to see how Mannis found a soul mate in him, across the centuries. I am haunted by the faces and actions of Wendy and Rick and others like them. I am left with a feeling of awe and gratitude that Mannis exists, that he cares to do what very few of us would do. The next time I see a homeless person, I know I will still walk on by. But I also know that I will see that person differently. And I know that I will be inspired again by the work of Mannis and others of the Outdoor Church, who embody the human capacity to hold faith and to persist in charitable love.