Last in a series.
Ma Siss's surgery was on Valentine's Day.
The new year, 2007, had hardly begun when she first felt the lump in her breast, and now it was time to deal with it. It was bitterly cold and snowing at 5 a.m. when her niece, Arlene, helped her into the car for the drive through icy streets from Upham's Corner to Boston Medical Center.
They unloaded at the wrong building on the hospital's sprawling campus, and by the time they found the right address, Ma Siss, about to turn 70, was crying from the confusion.
She had always been the rock, in her family, in her neighborhood, in the little church she'd helped found in a garage on Dorchester's Quincy Street.
But now she was tired. Lying on a gurney, an IV in her arm, listening as a parade of medical personnel disclosed the array of possible side effects from the mastectomy she was about to undergo, she didn't feel up to much. Someone else would have to take the lead.
The room was packed with family and friends.
Manny Baldwin, Arlene's husband, tried to offer encouragement. "You'll be dancing by Saturday," he said with a smile.
Dora Vaughan, Ma Siss's 46-year-old daughter, nervously ate the pecans she had roasted and buttered. She said she hoped the hospitalization would allow Ma a well-deserved rest.
"She has too much work to do," Dora said. "This is God's way of giving her a break."
But Ma Siss is no fool - at her age, and her weight, and with a host of other health issues, recovery would not be easy. Even as doctors walked her through a consent form she couldn't read, she started thinking about the next Saturday at church, and who would provide the food. She began to give instructions - there was bread in the freezer, and garlic powder in the cabinet; and because the weather was so cold, the food should be something warm. Maybe pasta with a meat sauce.
What had once seemed impossible - the birth of a church in a former chop shop - was as real as such a dream could be. But more than three years after Ma Siss and her neighbors named their growing prayer group the Quincy Street Missional Church, their hold on this shabby area near Upham's Corner remained fragile.
Would the church outlast its founding generation? Would its struggling food pantry and thrift shop - known still as Ma Siss's Place - survive the year?
And now, the questions seemed even more pressing.
Aaron Graham, the founding pastor, was passionate about Quincy Street, but also, at age 26, ambitious to have an impact on a larger stage. He and his wife, Amy, were both completing graduate degrees and were working hard to expand the network of young social-justice minded Christians they'd helped create.
Even before her surgery, Ma Siss, whose given name is Idene Wilkerson, was tired and often unwell, frustrated that so few members of her family joined her at church. Dora was often gone, lost in a haze of drugs and anger. Worshipers dropped in and out, but the size of the weekly Saturday afternoon service rarely seemed to budge much beyond 30. The congregation's evangelical goal, to transform lives by faith, had few success stories, and the founders' desire to find some younger local leaders who could help steer the church into the future had so far failed.
As she feared, Ma Siss's planned one-night hospital stay turned to three, because of pain and blood loss. On the Saturday after her surgery, mounds of ice coated Boston's sidewalks and streets; she was still in the hospital, and at the start of worship only 10 people were seated in the garage's new red-cushioned seats.
Tom Groeneman, a church elder who had risen from homelessness and was now taking seminary classes, was sitting alone in the back row with two jugs of seltzer water because he had been feeling sick. He started to cry.
"It's just that I'm scared I'm going to lose Ma," he said. "I thought she'd be here by now."
The congregation tried to reassure him.
"Ma's fine. She just needs prayers," said Ma Fann, another of the elders and Ma Siss's longtime partner in prayer.
But Tom was unconvinced. His own mother, he said, had died of breast cancer.
"All these years, since I lost my mom, I've been trying to have that kind of relationship with someone," he said. "Ma's the first person who I felt like was really that for me."
Again, voices were raised in consolation. And then Aaron spoke.
"The reality is, things would not be the same without her," he said. "And that time will come, whether it's now or in 20 years, so we do have to prepare. We can't act like Ma's always going to be around."
Aaron had long been on the lookout for what he called "indigenous" leaders, young African-American residents of the neighborhood who would help direct the congregation. Ma Siss had one such person in mind - her son, Willie Jr., but he was still incarcerated in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he was leading a Bible study group while serving a 10-year-sentence for possession of crack cocaine. He wouldn't be back on Quincy Street for some time.
The elders made the phrase "to develop leaders within the Quincy Street community" a part of their mission statement, and stenciled it into the garage wall. But no one had emerged. It was hard to focus on the future when the present was so perilous.
Violence had haunted the church, almost from the beginning. There was Derrick Edwards, killed in December 2004, and Stephen Thompson, shot in December 2005. A few months later, Ma Fann's 25-year-old nephew, Michael, went for a late-night cigarette run to a gas station on Blue Hill Avenue; he was shot twice in the back, and doctors said he'd never walk again.
Aaron and Amy redoubled their efforts to reach out to teenagers, winning city money to employ neighborhood youths during the summer, starting a weekly youth group at the church, even taking in Keyland Fields, a teenager known by his street-name Face, for a few difficult months of foster care, before they decided they couldn't handle him. Over time, the violence would continue: Face's brother, called Cheetah, was shot in the face just outside the Bird Street youth center in 2007. One night, Ma Siss's house was raided by the police, searching for a gunman they believed was hiding inside; the whole household was transferred to a bus to wait in the middle of the night. Another night, a young man with a gun chased Face into the house.
Not all of the teenagers were so troubled. Dora's youngest daughter, Keisha, enrolled at Pine Manor College, where she wanted to study dance. One of Stephen's brothers, Terrence, enrolled at a community college in Maryland through a connection of Aaron and Amy. The youth group was at times well attended, and a new resident of Drayton Street, an unemployed lawyer named Bobby Constantino, was working with the kids. Some were even preparing for a trip they could hardly imagine, to South Africa, with a teen group from Park Street Church downtown.
And the congregation had begun to invest its hopes in its youngest members.
On a sunny Saturday morning in May of 2006, members of the congregation gathered at Quincy Street for a baptism. They had arranged to use the baptismal pool at the International Community Church, in Allston, where church elder Ralph Kee's wife, Judy, is an associate pastor.
Inside the church, Aaron, Ma Fann - whose full name is Fannie Hurst - and the kids gathered in a hallway behind the sanctuary. Aaron offered a series of warnings, starting with "the water is going to be cold," and "don't breathe in," before he and Reenie, Ma Siss's granddaughter, handed out towels to the kids, already shivering in their black shorts and white T-shirts.
Adam Thompson, a foster child of Ma Siss and the oldest of the five kids gathered that day, was first. As he waded into the chilly water, Aaron introduced him, and then offered him an arm for support. He quickly lowered the boy into the water, and then lifted him back out, as the congregation, with Ma Siss in red in the front row, cheered. Daequan Baker was next, and then his brother, Dedric Dew, his sister, Destanie Baker, and then Nadaje Hendrix. A word of encouragement, a quick dunk, and a cheer; then Ma Fann in the hallway, waiting with a warm towel.
Aaron, standing alone in the pool, began to pray over the sound of children sloshing in the hallway behind him.
"This is just the beginning of many more lives that will be changed," he declared.
But the life that was changing most in the congregation was that of Tom, who lives in Bay Village but had connected with the Quincy Street prayer group in its earliest days. Born in Oklahoma and raised a Catholic, Tom, who is 51, had had more than his share of struggles - by his own account, since the age of 13 he has battled alcoholism and drug abuse and emotional problems. Then in 1978, while living in a homeless shelter in Long Beach, California, he started reading the Bible.
"I was going to a rescue mission, where every night you go and you listen to a sermon for about a half an hour or so and then you get to eat the meal, and when I heard the message, I chose to follow Christ," he said.
He was 21 and over the next decade, would move around the country, sometimes studying and sometimes struggling, before landing in Boston in 1988. He had periods of sobriety, and periods of addiction, but by 2004 he had become a daily participant in Alcoholics Anonymous, and decided to find a church.
"I didn't have friends and the friends I did have, all they wanted to do was use me to get money for drugs or alcohol," he said. "It got to a point where I was just fed up with the whole lifestyle, you know, just wanting to get drunk or stoned. It stopped working. It wasn't fun anymore."
It was a chance encounter with Aaron that led Tom to Quincy Street, and the power of Ma Siss that kept him there.
"She helped me heal emotionally, and it wasn't a therapist-patient relationship or a doctor-patient relationship or a formal pastor-congregant relationship . . . I just felt God's love touching me through her. . .I don't know how else to explain it."
Tom started leading a weekly Bible study at the church, sometimes just for Ma Siss and Ma Fann, and he occasionally filled in as preacher when Aaron was away. His days were scheduled around AA meetings, but he also started taking classes at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Center for Urban Ministerial Education. And then Aaron decided to ordain him, a first for the congregation.
One Sunday early this year, Aaron gathered a group of local ministers in the garage to examine Tom's readiness for ministry. Dressed in a suit Aaron and Amy had bought him for the occasion, Tom spoke about his conversion to Christianity, and his passion for ministry.
Then, on St. Patrick's Day, about 30 of Tom's friends and church members gathered at the garage. Dressed again in his blue suit, he stood and talked of his previous drug use, homelessness, and years of confusion.
"In my brokenness, I knew there had to be something better for me," he said. "But it took me a long time to figure out what I really was called to do."
And then, Aaron asked Tom to sit on a chair in the middle of the room, and he hit the play button on a boom box, starting a hymn called "Oh God of Mine."
Amy came up first, placing her hands on Tom's head, and whispering words of encouragement into his right ear. And then a line began to form. One by one, the worshipers walked up to Tom to lay their hands on his head, an echo of the ancient ritual for ordination. Ma Fann gave him a full embrace, and, as she got up to walk away, murmured: "Yes, God. Yes, God." Ma Siss, too weak to stand, sat in a chair by his side, placed her right hand on his left chest, and caressed his shoulder as the smell of frying oil drifted into the room and Tom began to cry.
Tom's ordination capped a difficult period for the church. Dora had drifted further and further away - she was now shooting up heroin, she had attempted to OD on sleeping pills, she was barely speaking to anyone from the congregation, and she had started stealing to support her drug habit. Ma Siss was recovering from her surgery, which had jolted the congregation. And then there was the death of Melissa "Missy" Thompson, the mother of Stephen, who had been shot, and Terrence, who went to college, and Adam and Keith.
Missy was among the original members of the breakfast prayer group that began meeting in the garage after Ma Siss bought it in 2000. She was wiry and giddy and beaming, punctuating every interaction with a hug and a kiss. She was 40 years old, episodically homeless, infected with AIDS, and had, 10 years earlier, left her four sons to Ma Siss's care. She prayed desperately about her longing to be clean.
But prayer had not been enough. Hospitalized for pneumonia, Missy had managed somehow to procure crack cocaine on the steps of Boston Medical Center, and by the time she was discovered, the only thing left was for her four boys to ponder whether and when to pull the plug.
She died at 5:20 the morning of March 9; six days later, she was laid out for what Aaron called her "homegoing."
Mourners crowded into the tiny JB Johnson funeral home on Warren Avenue, overflowing into a hallway from which they could not see her body in a steel-gray casket covered with flowers and a giant pink bow, or smoking on the damp porch where they could not hear the litany of memories of a better time. A steady rain fell outside.
At Mount Hope Cemetery, they lined up in the mud. Mostly there was silence, broken at the end by a shriek turned into a long, loud, wail. "Missy," her sister Malvina cried. "Missy!"
"We know for certain Missy is with the Lord," Aaron said, holding a microphone in his right hand and punching the air with his left. He told the mourners - among them, just about everyone who called that garage their spiritual home - that a few days before Missy's death, he had run into her, obviously troubled, on the street. Would he sing, she'd asked him, her favorite hymn, "Somebody Prayed for Me"?
And so, standing on the sidewalk, the winter air and city traffic rushing by, he began to sing.
Aaron was constantly torn over how best to help Quincy Street. With a few phone calls, he could produce help from outside the neighborhood, and he often he did. But he knew that success would not be measured by such things, but by what he left behind - the leaders and the structure - that had a chance to endure.
Aaron's mind was also very much on the world beyond Ma Siss's Place. Nearing completion of a degree from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, he was tracking the national conversation over the state of evangelicalism, and found himself strongly drawn to those who feel that the evangelical movement nationally has become overly aligned with one party - the Republicans - and obsessed with sexual mores. A more directly Christian focus, he believed, should be on the poor. He had caught the eye of Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners magazine, whose national profile skyrocketed with the publication of his 2005 book, "God's Politics."
Over the Memorial Day holiday, Aaron and Amy took a brief vacation with his family on the Gulf shores of Alabama, and while there, he made what he described as "the most difficult decision of my life," to leave Quincy Street and take a job as a national field organizer with Wallis's Sojourners organization in Washington, D.C.
"It's hard to not live for expectations of other people. Some people are like, 'You've been all about downward mobility, and being in the trenches, and now it feels like you're selling out'," he said a few days later. "It would be easier to stay in Boston, because that's what I know, and DC is a place of a lot of talk and little substance. But you come to a point where you have to follow the spirit's leading the best you understand it."
They flew back on a Friday night; the next day, a steamy June Saturday, Aaron told the church, reading tearfully from a letter he had drafted hours before.
Over the next several weeks, the people of Ma Siss's Place struggled with the news.
"It wouldn't be right for us to try to hold you here," Ma Fann, dressed head to toe in pink, said one Saturday. "God sent y'all here - we didn't ask - and that's why we went so far. . . . I'm glad I was in your life when you started."
Dorothy "Dot" Dawes, who came to worship whenever she could get a ride there, offered a simple exhortation, "don't go!" while Emanuela "Nadia" Varela, a 24-year-old Cape Verdean immigrant, who discovered the church after her brother helped paint the building, offered her own song for the occasion, "Can't Give Up Now."
Then Ma Siss, silent to this point, offered a closing thought, on the importance of moving on.
"If I still been down there picking cotton, I wouldn't be in this church," she said. "God is going to use you. God is going to test you. Yes, Lord."
Aaron foresaw a testing time as well - and warned them all to guard this fragile congregation.
"When one set of leaders leaves, there is a vacuum, and unfortunately, when there's a vacuum, somebody is always going to step in," he said as a siren sounded outside and a cat wandered through the room. "Paul warned them that savage wolves try to step in, and I want to issues a similar warning. As Ma Siss says, not everybody who says 'Amen' means 'Amen'. I challenge you not to allow someone to come in and destroy it."
Aaron and Amy allowed themselves five weeks for the move. It was a time for reflection on what had worked and what had not.
A true community had formed. "We didn't just share the Gospel, but our lives," he said. "And we haven't talked a lot about racial reconciliation, but it is quite a testimony to God's grace."
But there had been so many disappointments. "I put too much pressure on myself to start programs, and many things we tried to start failed," he said, ticking off a litany of abandoned efforts - a Cape Verdean Bible study, an addiction recovery ministry, a financial savings class.
Still, he said: "The real transformation is going to happen inside people. And I've never felt so connected. I feel tired, but I've never felt so much personal revival."
Once or twice a week, Aaron and Amy met with Ma Siss, Ma Fann, Tom, and Ralph - the six church elders - to figure out what would come next. It was an urgent conversation, for reasons inside and out. On June 27, as they began, Aaron noted that a 7-year-old had just shot an 8-year-old not too far away.
Together, they outlined their priorities for the church. Worship. Community. Food for the poor. But they knew they needed a leader, and Ralph, a veteran church planter who had been with them almost from the start, was the obvious choice.
"Somebody needs to be in charge, and I'm willing," he said. "Maybe I can make a contribution, and if it becomes apparent it isn't working, I can move on. No hard feelings."
The details were surprisingly easy. The elders, without debate, agreed that Ralph would assume the role of lead pastor, and Tom would assist him. They named Nadia as their music minister - for weeks the Berklee College of Music student had been playing that role anyway - and Bobby Constantino, who was living on Drayton, to continue his ministry to the youth.
"The main thing I'm grateful for is it's not a stranger coming in," Ma Siss, fully recovered from her surgery, said of Ralph, as she hoisted a fruit jar filled with tea. "He's been with us through thick and thin, and that really means a lot."
On a mid-July Saturday, the congregation gathered for Aaron and Amy's farewell service. Ma Siss dressed up for the occasion, in a floral print dress; Aaron stuck to a more low-key approach, wearing beige cargo pants, Teva sandals, and a blue and yellow Nautica polo shirt. Just 15 people were present as Nadia got up to sing, but Aaron noted that singing had begun to function as a kind of call to worship for Quincy Street - as the sounds hit the street, people would drift in.
As Nadia, joined by two little girls, danced and clapped and stomped her shoes, the small gathering rose to its feet. Ralph rose with them, and led the turn to prayer.
"Lord, we're looking forward to the day when this church will be too small," he said. "We know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that's what you want to happen."
"Yes, Lord," Arlene shouted.
And then, for the last time, Aaron got up to preach.
"My vision for this church is Ma's vision for this church, which is that you come as you are," he said, as a chorus of "Amens" began to rise. "And that you would feel welcome to walk in here right off the streets. You wouldn't have to worry about what you're wearing, or if you've cleaned up your life first before you walk through those doors."
As he worked his way through his list of exhortations, he began to cry. As someone shouted, "let it out baby," he mentioned Dora, who hadn't been seen in the church for months.
"As Dora always taught me to say, it's never good-bye, it's see you later."
The congregation began to cheer.
Five months would pass before Dora, on Dec. 8, walked back in. Ralph was presiding, Ma Siss was cooking, and Dora, just a few hours earlier, had been released from prison.
She and her husband had been busted for shoplifting at a Walgreens, and she had spent 50 days at the Suffolk County House of Correction at South Bay. She was miserable behind bars, but she was also sober, and missing church, missing people, missing cooking.
"I wasn't raised to steal, lie, and cheat, you know what I'm saying, but I let the devil, which is the drugs, take control of my true aspects and wear me down," she said shortly before her release. "The miracle is that I'm still alive, and my faith is stronger than ever. . . . You don't have to get rich or success in order for it to be a miracle. It's the little things, you know."
She had promised God she would come straight from prison to church, and so she did, wearing a sweat shirt and cradling her granddaughter in her arms. She sat quietly in the third row, next to Ma Siss, and listened.
Bobby Constantino, the youth pastor, was conducting a mock trial, with a jury of local teens, to see whether he could prove Jesus was the son of God or was a crazy man. As he talked through the reasons to believe in Jesus, Dora leaned toward her mother and whispered, "He's a good lawyer."
And when Ralph, presiding over the service, briefly paused to welcome her back, Dora said, simply, "It's good to be here."
About 35 worshipers applauded as the jury of teens decided in favor of Jesus's divinity. And then Nadia, in a hooded winter jacket, handed her baby to her husband and walked through the church, singing the "Victory Chant." As she belted out each lyric and worked her way to the center of the room, in front of the mural of a black-skinned Jesus leading a group of young black teenagers, the worshipers began to clap and sway and repeat each phrase after her.
Afterward, they all piled plates high with the ham and potatoes Ma Siss had been cooking since morning. Dora gave Bobby a big hug and offered to help with the youth. "You have to stay clean," he told her. "You have to." Ralph came over, and she asked him to meet with her to explain how to find forgiveness.
But mostly, smiling and serious, she talked of her plans.
"God has kept me alive for a reason," she said. "This is my chance."
A week later, Dora was frying a turkey in her apartment at 22 Drayton, while Arlene Baldwin and Darnell Booker were working in Ma Siss's kitchen at #16, preparing the meal to serve after that day's worship. Barbecued ribs and steak tips were in the oven, and macaroni and cheese was on the stove. Ma Siss sliced cheese and barked out orders: "Bring me that pan! Add more pepper!"
Christmas was coming, and then another new year. Talk had turned, cautiously, to the future. Arlene expressed hope that some of the neighborhood children would take over one day, while Ma Siss expressed newfound optimism that Willie Jr. would be sprung early from federal prison.
And then, the cooking done, they gathered in the church, where Ralph asked them all to join him in prayer.
"It was the most unlikely place in the world, to start a church in a garage where they had been chopping up stolen cars and selling the parts - that's the last place most people would think we're going to start a church," he said. "But Jesus says, you're going to see heaven poured out on you, and we're hoping that's going to happen here."
In the back of the church, Ma Siss, seated quietly, smiled.
Michael Paulson can be reached by e-mail at mpaulson@globe.com. Pat Greenhouse can be reached at greenhouse@globe.com.
