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Posted: March 3rd, 2011 Ken Garfield

A shared passion to be of community good in Huntersville has led the Revs. Byron Davis and Mike Moses to forge a bond that has grown now to include their latest campaign.

Exchanging pulpits.

 “Community good” is the phrase Moses uses to explain what drives these two clergy friends to take the gospel of reconciliation where it is needed most: Out of the church and into a world too often divided by race, class and fear. Moses leads the predominantly white Lake Forest Church off Interstate 77 at exit 23. Davis pastors Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist, a largely African American church off Beatties Ford Road. Yet when the two pastors and congregations come together as they often do for worship, service and socializing, division gives way to a zeal to heal the world’s wounds. 

“Heaven,” Davis says, “will not have African Africans or whites. We are brothers in Christ.”

Davis will preach Sunday (March 6) at Lake Forest, planning to deliver a message about the need to put Christ and family first in life. He’s calling it “The Needful Thing.” The Xchange Sermons initiative will see Moses preach at Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist on March 20, echoing the message these two congregations have been putting into practice for several years.

The two churches couldn’t be more different: Founded in 1998, Lake Forest is a largely white church that draws up to 2,000 each Sunday to its new campus, having met previously in a skating rink and then the Lake Norman YMCA. Its contemporary worship and informal style strikes a chord with a suburban crowd. Founded in 1868, just after the Civil War freed the slaves, Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist draws 250 to its more traditional black Baptist style of Sunday worship. Davis has led the congregation for 20 years.

When a determination to do some community good sparked a friendship between the two pastors, ministry followed.

Members of the two churches have worked together to do home repairs for the elderly. The two pastors started a local chapter of the community activist group H.E.L.P. (Helping Empower Local People) to address social justice concerns in the area. The congregations have partnered to welcome the homeless to Lake Forest through Room in the Inn. Mt. Olive folks gladly bring the meals. Davis has led a morning men’s Bible study at Lake Forest. He also took a mission trip to India to help plant a church through Lake Forest. Moses says the partnership has helped his congregation embrace what he calls a more holistic theology of the gospel – a broadening, community-minded experience for evangelical Presbyterians more accustomed to focusing on deepening their individual relationship with God.

During a 24-hour prayer vigil at Lake Forest, Davis opened with a prayer for repentance, Moses says, because the land on which Lake Forest is built was associated many years ago with slaveholders.

 “He prayed that this land would now be a place of perpetual blessing,” Moses says, “where before it had been a place of perpetual cursing.”

Given the partnership, and the warm exchange of pulpits, those days of perpetual cursing seem like a lifetime ago.

Ken Garfield, director of communications at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, N.C., has written extensively on Xchange Sermons. He previously served as religion editor at The Observer. Reach him at ken@mpumc.org.

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