I long for racial unity in the Church because I once experienced a taste of it. There was such a sense of rightness—of beauty, joy, and well-being—that I will always search for it. It is the joy set before me.
There is no question that this joy lines up with the Word of God. Jesus prays in John 17 that we would be one. He doesn’t pray that God would whisk us away to a bunker where we’re safe from BLM, Antifa, and the godless Democrats. No, he says, “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.”
Wow. Just savor those words for a moment. Let them sink in.
Jesus already knew that Peter would be crucified upside down, that James would die by the sword, that John would be exiled to Patmos. He knew that Jerusalem would fall in AD 70 under the most excruciating of circumstances, with a degree of suffering unseen to that day. He didn’t pray about that stuff, except that the “evil one” wouldn’t prevail. He prayed that his disciples would be one, as he and the Father were one.
“May they be brought to complete unity,” Jesus said, “to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
For 22 years, I was a member of a small Black Pentecostal church in South Dallas. Most of the time, my husband, my son, and I were the only white members. Want to know how I ended up there? Well, it’s a weird story, one that involves what I believe to be an angel, plus soca music from Trinidad. Sorry to leave you hanging, but I’ll tell that story some other time. I’ll say this: There is no question that God brought me there. I never would have found that church on my own.
My former pastor built this church on miracles. The nucleus of the congregation was people who’d been delivered from drug addictions through his street ministry. But even though he was in the ‘hood, at a time when the surrounding community was 99 percent Black, my pastor had this crazy vision about nurturing a multiracial church. I knew that vision came from God.
My husband and I answered the call. And don’t think we were some great gift to the body because of our dazzling whiteness. We were ignorant and hard-headed. We had no clue about the racist assumptions embedded in our minds and hearts. It took many years, multiple layers of repentance, and a ton of grace from all involved for God to knit together a church family that included people of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds.
I can tell you that every bit of good that came about in this tiny multiracial church was forged by the power of the Holy Spirit. Holy Ghost does that. He’s the bond that’s thicker than blood. There were times when our Sunday services were weighty with the presence of the Spirit. I saw sinners repent and demons cast out. And I witnessed the greatest miracle of all—transformed lives.
After some years, we became a family. A kind of ungainly one, with lots of quirky folks and the occasional quarrel. But that Holy Ghost bond, which manifests in brotherly love, is so much stronger and deeper. The family hooptie somehow held together.
There were days when I felt such joy and elation. I think we all knew that God was doing something in our midst. We hadn’t read a bunch of books on racial reconciliation, because racial reconciliation wasn’t a thing yet. But we knew we were tapping into what God had always intended. It wasn’t always shalom, because people are people and we have our tough days, but it was enough that we knew we’d glimpsed something momentous, something amazing.
There was a certain point, however, where I could sense this spirit of division moving across the country and even among us in the church family. The Holy Spirit began waking me up in the night to pray against a demon of division. I knew that none of us was exempt from the influence of this foul spirit; to the extent that we failed to walk in love toward each other, that demon had a foothold in our lives.
And time would show that many of us, including me, were deficient in love, just like the American Church today.
One Sunday morning, I knew I had a word of prophecy for the church. The pastor recognized me, and I got up and spoke it—in tongues. I had never spoken a word of prophecy in tongues before.
And when I did what I had never done before, another woman who had never interpreted a prophetic word in tongues before got up and interpreted the word in tongues.
Many of us remember her interpretation word for word: “Unity or we die.”
I wish I could say that our little church held together, but it didn’t. Though at times I’m tempted to point the finger at this or that person, surely we have all sinned. And what we didn’t realize is that we were bucking up against demons that have held this country in their grip for 400 years.
Here we are, a decade after I heard “Unity or we die.” The American Church has never been more divided along racial lines, and while my Black brothers and sisters cry out from the pain of that division and the demonic oppression that goes with it, many of my white brothers and sisters cling harder to their idol and king, President Donald Trump, who boasts that he has “saved your damn neighborhood.”
I encourage you, while you still can, to choose life. Not just the lives of the unborn, but those who are already living under the heel of the systems white men built to serve themselves.
It will be so worth it. There is joy set before us: the beauty of a multitude greater than anyone could ever count, people from every nation, tribe, and language, worshiping God together.
