Mail me comments, suggestions, warnings, flames, whatever Chapter 1 Part 9
After those days call was more often heard. Each year one or two new missions were launched. A common practice was to give our Christmas and Easter offerings to the newest of them, so that it would have seed money. Most of the missions were eventually able to support their own work. However, when the annual budget was planned, the individual groups, having carefully considered their needs, presented them to the budget committee.
our mission group structures are tougher and more durable because they have had to cope with the financial dimension. A group responsible for its own finance is not likely to close shop for the summer or to show laxity in ways that it might if someone else were footing the bill. Furthermore, when the money is ours we relate to the whole sphere of economics in a way that would not otherwise happen. This became increasingly evident as our missions in the inner city placed us in the midst of the poor. We returned to our homes at night feeling less easy with our own life styles.
Our dis-ease was intensified in the fateful year of 1968 when rioting in our streets tore veils from our eyes, and !et us see in searing ways some of the misery of the oppressed. We looked differently at the boarded-up apartment building a few doors from The Potter's House and all of the decaying firetrap apartments and row houses in neighboring streets where the poor lived in crowded, miserable rooms, existing in what one reporter called "Dickensian squalor."
As we came to see more clearly the faces of those submerged in the crushing poverty of our own city, it became obvious that only those engaged in the struggles of the poor were going to be able to speak to them any message of God's reign. Around the tables of The Potter's House the conversation often turned to what we might do. The group which staffed The Potter's House on Thursday night began to give their attention to the massive problem of inadequate housing. They began to talk about purchasing an apartment house in the street behind The Potter's House and working with the tenants to upgrade it without raising the rents. In those days the foundations were laid for Jubilee Housing and for missions in education, health care and job placement that would come into being in the neighboring streets. When spring came the members of the new Jubilee mission group made the down payment on what would be the first of nine slum buildings that it would purchase and renovate in the years to come. Workshops in paperhanging, glass cutting, and plastering were scheduled, and people who never in a million years would have seen the inside of a slum apartment were engaged in the renovation of one.
Back to New Media Communications Home Page
Back to Internet Theological Seminary Table of Contents
Back to my "What is a Christian" page
Back to Balcony People Home Page