Unity Fall 1986

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Fundamentalist churches suffer from many stereotypes, but unity isn't one of them. The common image is usually one of scraps and splits. But if Truman Dollar isn't careful, he's likely to change that image.

During his sixteen-year pastorate at the Kansas City (Missouri) Baptist Temple, he saw the all-white congregation become racially integrated and at the same time grow to an average attendance of 1,800.

Two years ago he went to the ten-thousand-member Temple Baptist Church in the Detroit suburb of Redford. In addition to directing the diverse ministry there, he writes a monthly column for the Fundamentalist Journal, often calling into question divisive practices in the church.

The son of a Baptist minister, Dollar began preaching at age fifteen. He graduated from the University of Missouri, where he was president of both the honor society and the student body, then served churches in Florida, Missouri, and Michigan before becoming senior pastor in Kansas City in 1968.

LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Kevin Miller went to Detroit to explore his ideas on how to bring solidarity and concord to a church.

With all the other concerns facing pastors, is establishing unity all that important?

Unity is vitally important if for no other reason than the fact it validates the gospel. There aren't many things more important than that.

You can't expect to win people to Christ when the body is fragmented and warring.

When Jesus prayed in John 17 that the church be unified, what kind of unity was he referring to? Doctrinal unity? An emotional affection for one another? A sense of common mission?

In the New Testament, the church had to decide whether it would include both Jews and Gentiles. It had to decide if men and women would both be ...

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