Perceptions: Isaiah in Lima

As a freshman at a midwestern evangelical college 20 years ago, Jonathan Burkey was taking Theology 101, looking forward to a career as a minister. In class one day, the professor posed a question, “How can we measure the success of a local church?”

Burkey thought he gave a good answer — that a church should be feeding the poor, clothing the naked.

The professor responded, “That’s Social Gospel nonsense.”

“I had never heard of the Social Gospel,” Burkey said. “Little did I know then that the intersection of church ministry and social work had a long history of heated debate among conservative theologians.”

The professor’s rebuff did not deter Burkey from his path to ministry. He fulfilled his denomination’s requirement for ordination, and he earned a Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago.

After moving back to his hometown of Lima, Ohio, he became an associate pastor of a church, where he became more aware of issues such as the isolation of individuals, domestic problems and a disconnect between churches and the poor. He saw many people with many problems.

“A week into COVID, I presided at the funeral of a man who drank himself to death,” he said.

The next year, Burkey and his wife, Kate, embarked on being foster parents. The next year, another opportunity appeared.

“Downtown, there was a struggling church with just eight people,” he said.

He and his wife saw that as a calling. There were drawbacks — like a congregation with no money to pay a minister.

Again undeterred, Burkey became head pastor of Elm Street Church of the Nazarene.

“Some folks from our current church came with us. One had grown up there. A drug counselor who was a former addict joined,” he said. “People in the street found out about us. Rehab programs referred people to us.”

The Burkeys in 2021 also founded a nonprofit organization, Compassionate Ministries of Lima. Among its offerings is a Thanksgiving dinner; this past year 2,800 people were fed.

Among the poor people of Lima are Haitian immigrants. The work of Jonathan’s congregation with them was featured by NBC News this past August. (Marc Rocher, the science teacher, translator and Haitian immigrant facing deportation at the time of the story has since received an extension of his temporary protected status and work permit through 2027.)

At roughly the same period of life that Jonathan was being called to ministry, to Lima and to serve the poor, he embarked on another journey, enrolling in 2019 in the theology doctorate program at the University of Dayton. He sees his studies at UD as a way to explore questions about theology and ministry by taking a step outside his Protestant heritage.

In his second year at UD, William Portier, former program director of the doctoral program, encouraged Burkey to read the works of Walter Rauschenbusch, an early 20th-century Protestant theologian who wrote, "Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus.”

"Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus.”

“It was during that semester,” Burkey said, “that I realized the Social Gospel was not nonsense.” It was a theology developed among Protestants as a response to urbanization and industrialization.

“Many pastor and lay people alike were growing in the conviction that workers ought to have rights and the poor and marginalized in society could not be neglected by the churches,” Burkey said.

Catholics might see parallels between that development and some teachings that evolved in the Catholic Church, such as Rerum Novarum, the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on capital and labor.

Burkey’s dissertation director, William Trollinger, this spring suggested UD Magazine inform readers of Burkey’s work. The two had recently met to discuss a dissertation chapter Burkey was writing on the Social Gospel and the fundamentalist movement that organized in opposition to it.

Burkey’s studies and ministry intertwine. “We want the church to be a place where those who are often marginalized from the organized church find refuge, community and the Gospel,” he said.

“We want the church to be a place where those who are often marginalized from the organized church find refuge, community and the Gospel."

The mission of the Elm Street Church, he said, “is the text that Jesus proclaimed when reading Isaiah 61 from the synagogue in Luke 4 — ‘to proclaim good news to the poor … freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’”

A version of this article appears in print in the Summer 2026 University of Dayton Magazine, Page 35. EXPLORE THE ISSUE — MORE ONLINE