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  • 2013-07-23 (xsd:date)
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  • Pastor Disguises Himself as Homeless Man (en)
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  • This tale about a pastor who goes undercover as a homeless man is reminiscent of an urban legend based on the true story of an experiment conducted for a social psychology class at Princeton University in 1970, in which seminary students were sent on urgent assignments designed to take them past an actor posing as a person in need of assistance. Researchers measured whether (and how) students interrupted their pressing tasks to render help, and analyzed the results.In the story reproduced above, the actor portraying a homeless man is no psychology researcher, however — he's Jeremiah Steepek, the new head pastor of a very large church. After spending half an hour incognito in his new church prior to services and finding that only a very few congregants would even return his greeting (much less respond to his pleas for money to buy food), he reveals himself to his new flock and delivers to them a lesson in Christian compassion. But as for this particular version of the incognito clergyman tale, it appears to be a fabricated story. No one has yet identified a real pastor by the name of Jeremiah Steepek (or a similar variant of that name) or found any church, large or small, headed by a pastor with that name. Nor has anyone been able to verify the event described, even though it was supposedly witnessed by several thousand congregants. Additionally, the photograph of Pastor Jeremiah Steepek that accompanies the online version of this story is complete unrelated to the narrative: it's actually a picture of an unidentified homeless man snapped by photographer Brad J. Gerrard in Richmond (London): Although this particular narrative about a Pastor Jeremiah Steepek may be an invented one, the gist of the tale was expressed in some real-life incidents that took place in 2013. In June 2013, the Rev. Willie Lyle, the newly-appointed pastor of the Sango United Methodist Church in Clarksville, Tennessee, spent four and a half days living in the streets in the guise of a homeless man. He then transformed back into his role as pastor as he delivered a sermon: Similarly, in November 2013 Mormon bishop David Musselman posed as a homeless man and interacted with congregants outside a Taylorsville, Utah, church before services one Sunday: We also note that the plot of this anecdote is somewhat similar to an episode from the opening of In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, a best-selling 1897 book by Charles Monroe Sheldon (which features a real jobless man shaming a congregation and their pastor for their lack of compassion towards him, rather than a pastor pretending to be jobless in order to test his congregation): (en)
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