Last Letter

This morning, by chance, I came across the last letter that I wrote as an urban minister. My resignation was read the next day: "At the moment, the waters are muddied in the Church, and not for the right reasons, but looking back, mine was the only ministry in our Church in the past two generations that significantly grew the Church and improved its financial situation. It was also the only ministry in all the Churches on the Atlantic coast, as best I am aware, that survived nearly 20 years (22 years, if one adds my previous calls here).  People don't understand the extremes of urban ministry, and what one has to survive -- chaos and gun threats and pimps staking out their territory and arrogant people and squatters and financial peril, and so on -- and also, I would add, people tend not to see the grace of God in seeing an urban minister through."