This sensibility was most clear in McGavran’s remarkable paper, in which he argued that white solidarities in the United States were every bit as ethically legitimate as black solidarities. This was the conference at which he warned against “mongrel” congregations and advocated homogeneous congregations so Christians could worship “without raising difficult questions of cross-race dining, marriage and the like” (see chapter 3).63 His description of “cross-race dining” as something to avoid was surprising. As all the consultation participants knew, the New Testament described the sharing of
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