For part I, please click here.
I felt increasingly certain that God was leading me to stop simply appreciating interracial ministry; I was supposed to join an African American church. But which one?
One day an attractive African American friend named Kecia invited me to visit Orange Grove Baptist church with her. Kecia never went back after that night, but I felt drawn to the church. Carl, the pastor, had no one else who could pick up visitors, so he picked me up himself. On the way to church he shared with me his vision. “Some churches just want to reach the middle class,” he said, “but we want to reach drug addicts, prostitutes and people that a lot of other churches don’t want.” I remembered the neighborhood where I had lived when I first moved to Durham.
Like me, Carl was also looking for a friend. As time passed our common vision and friendship eventually convinced me to join the church. “But I prophesy every week in church,” I warned him.
Carl hesitated. “Well, that’s probably never happened here before,” he observed. “But it’s in the Bible, so if the Spirit moves you to do it, you’ve got to do it.” With my previous church’s public blessing I joined Orange Grove, and Carl brought me on as an associate minister. Arthur helped me with the biggest logistical transition: He taught me how to tie a tie. There. Becoming a Baptist was not so very complicated!
In one student Bible study, after Carl shared about ethnic reconciliation, I prophesied. As the Lord wept that His Body was divided by race, I could almost feel pain tearing me in half, the pain of Christ’s Body that should not be divided. Meanwhile the Spirit never once moved me to prophesy at the Baptist church. Carl made space for me to teach during the service, however, and I was able to let the Spirit guide me in how to do that; occasionally that teaching included discussion of spiritual gifts, and some members began to catch that vision. Carl also welcomed me to start a ministry to college students; eventually about fifty students attended the church.
Carl had learned a great deal from the Nation of Islam before his conversion. He advised me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Slave Narratives and some fairly radical people who looked like me had done to people who looked like my closest friends. I became so ashamed of the color of my skin that I felt like taking a knife and peeling it off, but as Carl preached each week how God made all of us in His image, I understood that I, too, was made in God’s image.
I also wept as I realized what it had meant for the gracious people of Orange Grove to embrace me. Some of them had lived through the civil rights movement. Some had suffered from whites while participating in”sit-ins.” Some older members had even known people born into slavery. And yet – they loved me as a brother in Christ, regardless of my skin color.
I was ordained at Orange Grove soon after I received my doctorate. The association sent an older minister to offer the ministerial charge, and she began praying over me in tongues.
“If you stay humble,” she prophesied, “God says He will use you.”
Carl, who had chosen a journalism major in college, did not know of any white ministers in recent history ordained in the National Baptist Convention, at least in the South. Unknown to me, he had an extra opportunity in mind. To my surprise, local television covered my ordination, and the Associated Press and Religious News Service soon carried stories on it as well. One Atlanta newspaper carried a two-page story. Many of the accounts mentioned my earlier conversion from atheism. For years I had shared my testimony with people one on one. Now when I was not even trying to share it, it went out to tens of thousands of people all at once!
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
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