For Those Earnestly Seeking Unity in the Church, Part 1

It’s a story I hesitate to tell today, because 33 years after the fact, it almost seems surreal. But in 1990, I was doing my job as a crime reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. On a particular Thursday night, I was driving around South Dallas, looking for story material. That part of the city was hopping. Jamaican gangsters ran the crack cocaine trade, and awful stuff was happening all the time. On this night, I got totally lost. I hadn’t lived in Dallas very long, and for some bizarre reason I thought that a church whose name started with

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Unity or We Die

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