"Using His Gifts in the Inner City" by Clifton Bryant

Ever since I became involved with SOS four and a half years ago, I have been in love with the vision it presents of living and working among the urban poor. I have been in love with the city of Memphis and the neighborhood of Binghampton, and I have longed to come alongside the ministries in this neighborhood to see lives transformed for the glory of Jesus Christ. But I do not have the personality usually associated with urban ministry. I am extremely shy and reserved. I have no administrative talent whatsoever. I have a hard time paying attention to what’s going on around me and sometimes create more confusion than clarity when I speak. This doesn’t seem like a very promising personality type for a job that involves forming relationships, organizing and deploying resources, and communicating. So as much as I loved this neighborhood, I always wondered if I really had anything to offer it.
I have always been at home as a student. I love ideas and arguments, and have a gift for understanding them and expressing them in writing. For years I’ve felt a call to use these gifts and passions to serve Christ in academia, and it seemed odd to take a detour from that goal to work in a field of ministry for which I seem to have no natural gifting. But I strongly felt that God wanted me to give a year of my life to Memphis.
So I came here. I came planning to spend my time doing a needs-assessment survey of the nearby neighborhood of Orange Mound. I was to gather demographic information on the neighborhood, and identify its areas of need and the resources available to it. This information was to be used by local ministries that are considering expanding their operations into Orange Mound.
The work got off to a bad start. The method I had for getting and organizing the census data I needed was a very tedious one. Attempts to get the data in a more user-friendly format hit technical roadblocks. It was unclear whether I would be able to get access to the mapping software I would need to do the project in the way my supervisor and I envisioned. I had a hard time focusing spending hours at a time staring at numbers. Weeks passed, and there was little indication that the project was coming together in any kind of useful form. I felt frustrated and useless. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake in coming here.
Perhaps sensing my frustration, or perhaps simply deciding that he would rather me be do something else, my supervisor began to ease me into a different task – that of articulating the biblical vision that inspires the work we do here in Memphis. For the last few months I’ve been writing a series of devotional essays designed to take people through Scripture and help them discern and respond to God’s call. They will be used to help those who will come join us in the work we do here and to recruit others to live their lives sacrificially for the sake of serving the poor in the name of Jesus Christ and for the sake of seeing the Gospel preached to the nations. This work is going well, and I feel that it is of real value to this community.
This isn’t really traditional urban ministry, but God has provided a way for me to support the ministries that serve this neighborhood by communicating the vision that drives us and recruiting more workers to the field. God has given me a way to serve this neighborhood that feeds directly into my personality, gifts, and interests – reading and analyzing Scripture, thinking about how the truths of Scripture apply to the work we do here, and communicating those thoughts in writing. He has also used this experience to give me a better sense of how I can use my gifts in the future to serve and build up the Church. I praise God for helping me overcome my ideas about what my gifts are and are not useful for and for allowing me to use them to serve the city he has led me to love.

November 2007