If you were to walk into a Baptist church in America in the mid-1950’s you’d most probably find the congregation made up of all black people or all white people. Very few churches at this time had achieved a racial mix. One of them was a Baptist Church in South Carolina, a stronghold of segregation and racism. The story of how the church came to be integrated is quite amazing.
The church had rundown to the point few people were left. The pastor died and there was no one to take his place. Another preacher put up his hand. He would become the preacher if the deacons would approve it. They did, and he stood up to preach his first sermon. His approach was to open his Bible at random and put his finger down and then preach. His finger landed on the passage in Galatians where we’re told that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female. And so the preacher spoke about how Jesus makes us one and that if that’s true there should be no racial divisions between us. When the service was over, the deacons took their new preacher to task. They didn’t want to hear that type of preaching again.
What was the new preacher’s response? He fired the deacons before they had a chance to fire him, and then preached his message about racial unity every Sunday. Before long he’d preached the church down to just four people.
“After that,” the preacher said, “we only let Christians in this church. Down here, we’re taught since we’re knee high to a grasshopper that there’s a difference between black folk and white folk and that they shouldn’t mix. But we know that when people get saved then all of that garbage is gone. We know that we got Christians on our hands when all that stuff about race is taken out of folk’s hearts. Well, when we got some Christians in this church, it started to grow and grow. And that’s how we got to the way we are now.”
The congregation grew to include people of all races and all kinds. One congregation member was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Southern Carolina. Sunday by Sunday this English professor with his Ph.D. from Yale University would drive 70 miles to listen to an uneducated, hillbilly preacher who couldn’t string together a grammatically correct sentence. When asked why he replied, “I go to that church because that man preaches the gospel.”
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Tony Campolo, YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE