Mail me comments, suggestions, warnings, flames, whatever Once a group came into existence, we struggled with naming the gifts of the members. The naming of call and the identification of gifts were soon extended to those touched by the mission. We asked Mrs. Henry, who was in our dinner program for the aged, "What would you like to do?"
"Nothing," she replied. "Nothing is what I want to do. For forty years I left home at 6:00 in the morning and traveled by streetcar and bus so that I could get to my place of work and have breakfast on the table by 7:30. I cooked three meals a day for that family, did their washing and cleaning, and reared their children. When I finished their dishes at night I went home and had to do for my own family. No, I don't plan to do nothing but sit, and sit, and sit. I never want to work again."
We learned then that evoking the gifts of those who live in the inner city asked something different of us. Mrs. Henry would not easily believe that her gifts of mind and spirit were needed in the liberation movement. Like so many thousands of the urban poor, she had left her rural home as a young person to pursue the promise of work and a better life in the city. She no longer believed in much of anything. She did not think about salvation for herself or for anyone else. Vast numbers of the poor, however, had another attitude. They had a growing consciousness of their right to participate in the working out of their own destiny, and were forcefully, sometimes angrily, presenting their claims. Others, deprived of opportunity for creativity, initiative, and space in which to move and rest, experienced rage, apathy, or despair.
If the listening to call and the exercising of gifts were unfamiliar concepts in our middle-class congregations, they were stranger still to those in the inner city where choice so seldom exists. And yet, the calls to which we then responded were not issued from the pulpit. They were sounded by the oppressed on the streets of the city, in tenement buildings and rat-infested alleys. By their very presence the poor were asking that we do more than 44 sit, and sit, and sit." "Hear, you who have ears to hear, what the Spirit says to the churches!"* 'Rev. 2:1 1, NEB.
In our small church community the mission groups began to multiply. They were structures that Gordon Cosby had helped to form and that were, in turn, forming him. Although his life was given to working with all the small groups, he was a member of only one, subject to its covenant, under the authority of those whose gifts had been confirmed, his heart and mind enlarged and stretched by commitment to the few. He was sometimes advised that his ministry would be increased if he divided his time equally among all the groups, but he remained unconvinced. He believed too passionately that strong leadership existed within all the groups. He was, however, and still is available to any group as guide and counselor. Sometimes he is called in at points of crisis to be a reconciler. More often he counsels a group in the early stages of its formation when members are defining their strategy,
The mission structure gave us a people to companion us in our individual freedom movement. Everyone struggles to break away from the oppressive inner structures that make us all prisoners of one kind or another. We need a people to journey with us out of our own .,Egypt into the broad land that is promised to all who believe in Him. "The Son will make you free." The expression of our own freedom will, in the end, be the only credible statement that each of us makes on freedom. Some will be freed for work in ghettos, others to strive for justice in county jails, in halls of government, ,,on boards of industry, or in the writing of a poem.
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