His niece Katie Seigenthaler, editor of Strobel’s final book, is the guest on the podcast’s 200th edition
by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service
Father Charles Strobel
LOUISVILLE — Two longtime hosts of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” celebrated the 200th installment of the broadcast last week by exploring the work of Father Charles Strobel, founder of Room In The Inn in Nashville, Tennessee, which shelters and offers numerous support services to people in need in the Music City.
Hosts the Rev. Lee Catoe and Simon Doong had Katie Seigenthaler as their guest for the milestone edition of “A Matter of Faith,” which can be heard here.
Seigenthaler is the niece of Strobel, who died last year. She served as co-editor, along with Amy Frogge, of the book “The Kingdom of the Poor: My Journey Home,” published Tuesday. Seigenthaler is a managing partner of FINN Partners, a Nashville marketing and public relations firm. Frogge is a longtime volunteer at Room In The Inn and an attorney, grant writer and member of the Nashville Symphony Choir.
The hosts asked Seigenthaler to talk about the Kingdom of God and what it looks like here on Earth. Catoe shared that he used to volunteer at Room In The Inn .
Strobel “believed that closeness with God and closeness with understanding how we all have a common bond of poverty that draws us to God is one of the reasons that so many people like me and like you, Lee, really benefitted from any moment we had in his presence,” she said.
Her uncle, a Catholic priest “who was extremely ecumenical,” wrote the book during the last few months of his life, Seigenthaler said. Among his goals for the book was to tell “the stories of people who made him who he was, the people who’d inspired him to seek and to find the kingdom of justice and peace.”
For her uncle, who most people called “Charlie,” the Kingdom of God while growing up was a quiet block in the Germantown neighborhood in North Nashville, where his closest friends and family lived, or who lived nearby. “He always said it was a place where the poor worked for the poor, where the poor took care of the poor. He always thought of himself as poor, and yet it was never a moniker of shame for the people who lived in that neighborhood. It was a way of saying, ‘I understand you and I understand your suffering, your joys and your sorrows, and I want to be a part of that. I want to live that with you and help you through it, because I know when my time comes, you’re going to help me.’”
Strobel’s father died when the boy was 4½. “So many people stepped into that void to support him and support his family and his mother,” Seigenthaler said. “They got by because they loved the people who lived around them, their family and their neighbors and their friends, and because those people loved and took care of them. His family didn’t want for much.”
“What they did have in abundance was love,” Seigenthaler said. “It was the best understanding he ever had of what the Kingdom of God was like.” As Strobel grew older, “he came to understand that many parts of the world and many parts of his own city didn’t have that same feeling and didn’t take care of one another in the same way.”
Strobel “decided he was going to spend his entire life trying to duplicate the kingdom of the poor by taking care of, nurturing and providing a home for those who had no home, the poorest of the poor,” Seigenthaler said. “For Charlie, the kingdom of the poor was the kingdom he was born into,” and so the kingdom he sought and created was Room In The Inn. “Everything Room In The Inn tried to do to give those who had no home and no neighborhood” came out of “a sense of that justice and peace that he believed everyone had a right to.”
Catoe said he remembers Room In The Inn as “a place where you are a person, not an issue we are talking about. People could be in a safe space and be who they were. I’ll never forget walking through those doors and seeing a different model from other homeless outreach organizations. I know that was a throughline in his work — the Kingdom of God is about humanizing all people.”
“Everyone was treated with respect, and the only thing that could get you ostracized from Room In The Inn … was if you did not return respect, love and kindness in turn,” Seigenthaler said. Strobel was not one to smooth out people’s rough edges, she said. “He just wanted to love you the way you were and the way he hoped God loved him” and “loved everybody who God ever created.”
Doong pointed out that when Strobel used the term “’kingdom of the poor,’ ‘kingdom’ implies value. Kingdom implies having something to offer, and to offer something to each other, they have power and the ability to do something pretty great.”
The Kingdom of the Poor” was published Tuesday.
Seigenthaler called that “so astute” and noted Strobel has “a lovely lilting storytelling quality in the book. It’s these wonderful little gems of stories he told about the people who made him what he was. Then she read a passage about one such person, the janitor of the church on the block where Strobel grew up.
“The only way we will bring the Kingdom of God here is to listen to those who are poor,” Catoe said.
“What can they teach me?” Strobel would ask, according to his niece. “What can their life experience teach me about our shared poverty, our shared experiences, and how together we can better one another’s lives? I use ‘they’ and ‘them’ language he probably wouldn’t appreciate, because the fact of this is, we’re all in this together.”
“If we believe the kingdom is a manifestation of how we share and understand about common poverty as opposed to a place where we solve everybody’s problems, then we’re getting there,” Seigenthaler said. “We’re really getting there, and we’ll manifest the kingdom here and get it close to what the Kingdom of heaven is going to be for all of us once we get to that point.”
If Strobel were in on the conversation, “he’d be talking about poverty of the spirit a lot,” Seigenthaler said. “When we feel alone and destitute in our grief, in our pain, in our shame and in our hurt — whatever those experiences that every human at one time or another is going through, those are the things that bind us together.”
Catoe fondly recalled the honor of preaching at Room In The Inn’s Easter sunrise service one year. “Father Strobel was still with us. It was a powerful, powerful service,” he said. “That’s how I imagine the resurrection happening — who was there and how joyful it was to celebrate the resurrection … I think it’s important for us to remember that having the Kingdom of God here on Earth is a joyful thing, and doing that work is joyful too.”
In the book’s epilogue, “Pick Up the Burden,” Strobel asks “all of us to be servants of one another and allow others to be servants to us, no matter what our station in life,” Seigenthaler said. “We’re all poor, and we’re all worthy of love.”
“We miss him terribly,” Seigenthaler said, “but boy, he’s left us a beautiful, beautiful legacy in this very accessible and lovely memoir.”
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