Every fourth or fifth meeting, the discipleship groups at Cross Culture Church, an Alliance church plant in Cordele, Georgia, have an outreach in their community. On one occasion, Pastor Robbie Edalgo decided to take his group on a prayer walk with a large, wooden cross he had just acquired.
When a few African-American men drove by, they saw a big white man carrying a cross and assumed the group was on a white supremacist march. They called a friend, Alex*, who caught up with Robbie’s team after some African-Americans had joined them in prayer.
Alex approached Robbie and asked, “What are y’all doing?”
“We’re praying for people,” Robbie said. “Can we pray for you?”
Alex declined the offer and then confessed why he was there. “It broke my heart,” Robbie remembers. He hugged Alex, and Alex agreed to join them in praying for Cordele.
When Robbie opened his eyes after the prayer, he saw a shotgun on the floorboard of Alex’s truck and shells poured out on the passenger seat. Robbie then realized that Alex had been expecting a violent confrontation.
“There’s a lot of racial hurt. People are hurt, and there are walls up,” Robbie says. “We’re entering into the story at what I believe is an opportune time.”
Being the Kingdom
When Cross Culture Church was planted at the end of 2016, the vision to have a church that crossed racial lines was already in motion. “We read in Revelation what Christ’s Kingdom will look like—every tongue, every tribe, every nation,” Robbie says. “We believe that a multiethnic community of believers is the gospel.”
Their first project was an outreach to teenagers who were living in subsidized housing. Ninety-eight percent of the residents are African-Americans, compared to 61 percent of the rest of the community.
“We go out in areas that are wonderfully diverse, and our church is already multiethnic to a degree,” Robbie observes. “So when we go out, we look like the Kingdom, and we’re reaching out to the Kingdom.”
The Lord gave them access to an old gym from the 1920s. It had no heater or air conditioner, but kids still came to play games and hear about Jesus every few weeks. Their first event took place during Christmas 2016, and they found that most of these youths did not know the story of Christ’s birth. Over the course of these outreaches, nine students accepted Christ.
Unifying Ethnicities and Churches
The mission to bring all ethnicities together has also started unifying area denominations. A few individuals from other churches joined Cross Culture’s teen outreach, and one of the biggest churches in the county has started having Bible studies with an African-American church nearby.
The racial hurt that Robbie saw in Alex has also shown up in conversations he has had with other church leaders in his area. He invited a deacon from a large, local church to his home for dinner. The man started to make generalizations about African-Americans, so Robbie made him leave.
Robbie’s mentor reminded him that he needed to join these leaders in their journey toward reconciliation rather than turn them away. “You have to make sure the relationship’s restored,” he said.
Robbie called the deacon and apologized. A few months later, they decided to study God’s Word together at a restaurant. An African-American friend of Robbie’s came by on his break and sat down with them to talk about the Lord.
“Because of the grace of Jesus Christ, all three of us got to dismiss assumptions about one another,” Robbie observes. “It’s clear that this is part of the reason we’re here—to enter the journey with existing churches in the ministry of racial reconciliation.”
*Name changed