Gathering the Waters: Reflections on a Life Made for Ecumenism

There is a moment in Genesis when God gathers the waters together and calls the gathering good (Genesis 1:9). That is not the passage that announced my call. My call was confirmed later, in the first chapter of Jeremiah. But Genesis 1:9 has become the truest exposition I know of what the Lord actually said to me at eighteen years old, and of what I have spent 26 years of ministry trying to live out.

The word came to me in a vision. I saw myself dressed in a white tunic and turban, running across a grassy savanna until I came upon a mountain. Above that mountain hung a great basin, pouring water over its peak. As the water cascaded down the mountainside, it carved rivers into the landscape below. Many of those rivers ran off on their own courses. But many others converged, becoming tributaries that fed into one massive river. The next day, I heard the voice: you shall gather my waters. I understood the meaning was not vague. It was a vision of the many streams of the body of Christ, running their separate courses, converging into one mighty river. And I heard it as a description of the assignment I had been given, not something I would merely do, but something I would be.

It is worth pausing on the fact that I am from Mississippi, a name that itself means Father of Waters. To have received a call to gather the waters, and then to have spent the bulk of my ministry doing that gathering from the banks of the mightiest river state in the country, feels less like coincidence and more like a signature God left on the assignment from the beginning.

I did not understand then how literally that word would prove true, or how long the gathering would take, or how many rooms it would run through before arriving at this one. Now, as the founding director of the Office of Ecumenical Engagement for the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, I see another moment of this vocation of gathering waters.

A Gospel Gumbo

I grew up Missionary Baptist. That was home, the first language of my faith, the cadence I learned to pray in before I could explain what I believed. But faith is rarely tidy, and mine took a detour in my teenage years when my father united with a Black United Methodist congregation, where I was confirmed and later baptized by immersion. Then came an encounter that reordered everything: a life altering, trajectory shifting experience with the Lord inside an independent charismatic church, the very place where my call to ministry was began to take shape.

By the time I was seventeen, I had already lived inside three distinct streams of Black Christianity: Missionary Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal-Charismatic. I did not choose that hybridity. It chose me. And for years I wrestled with what it meant to carry all three inside one body, one calling, one theological imagination. I have come to call this inheritance my gospel gumbo, a phrase that captures something true about the Black church tradition itself. We have never been as denominationally pure as our church marquees suggest. We have always been simmering together, borrowing from each other, feeding each other, even when our official bodies kept a polite and sometimes not so polite distance.

College deepened the flavor of that gumbo rather than resolving it. I encountered Reformed theology, Anglican and Episcopal liturgy, Catholic sacramental imagination. I returned to my Baptist roots, but I returned as someone who had traveled and could not unsee what I had seen. I came home affirming women in ministry and every operation of the Spirit’s gifts, while also believing deeply in structure, order, and the discipline of a written prayer alongside the fire of an extemporaneous one. I was, by then, thoroughly unwilling to be a denominationalist while still loving my denomination. The Lord’s church is bigger, richer than that.

It was also at the University of Mississippi that I met one of my most formative mentors, a Bapticostal clergy couple. They carried deep ties to the Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International, and their mentorship became the first current in what I now recognize as a series of increasing waves, each one pulling me closer to a shore I would not reach for another two decades.

Duke Divinity School gave that conviction a scholarly home. Under the shadow of Karl Barth and the neo-orthodox tradition, I found language for what I had been living intuitively for years: that the church catholic is bigger than any single household within it, and that fidelity to one tradition does not require blindness to the gifts of another. Duke also gave me something more embodied than language. I sat under a New Testament scholar who prayed in tongues in the quiet of his own devotion, and I studied under a professor who had come up in the United Holy Church before becoming Missionary Baptist, a walking archive of the Sanctified church tradition. Watching serious, credentialed scholars hold that kind of hybridity without apology or explanation gave me further permission to do the same. They did not just teach me about the wider Spirit-filled tradition. They helped me embrace it as my own.

Coming Home to Bridge Work

My first job after divinity school was with Mission Mississippi, a racial and denominational reconciliation ministry working across the state. It was not incidental training. It was providence, preparing my hands for the work they would do for the next two decades.

When I became pastor of Mt. Helm Baptist Church, I inherited a congregation whose very walls carried an ecumenical inheritance. Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason commenced a holiness revival there that was, from its very inception, interdenominational in spirit and development. The Spirit that gathered saints across denominational lines in that sanctuary over a century ago was the same Spirit that had been gathering me since I was a teenager. I did not choose Mt. Helm’s ecumenical DNA. I inherited it, and it recognized something in me that I recognized in it.

From there the assignments multiplied, each one a further widening of the gathering. I served as ecumenical affairs lead for the General Missionary Baptist State Convention of Mississippi (GMBSC). I created an ecumenical affairs commission for the National Baptist Convention USA. I now serve as third vice president of the GMBSC, where ecumenical engagement remains part of my portfolio. Our fight to change the Mississippi state flag, and other social and political moments besides, became occasions to organize across denominational lines toward a broader Kingdom agenda, because the truth is that the powers we are up against have never respected our internal boundaries, and neither should our resistance.

One moment stands out as a kind of signpost. One hundred twenty five years after the Holiness revival that began at Mt. Helm, I had the privilege of bringing leaders from the Church of Christ Holiness USA, the Church of God in Christ, and the General Missionary Baptist State Convention/National Baptist Convention back home to Mt. Helm for a commemorative service honoring that shared legacy. Watching those traditions, born from one Spirit and scattered by history, gather again under one roof, I understood that I had been rehearsing for this my whole ministry.

The Office This Was Always Building Toward

The waves kept increasing. Seven years ago, I formally joined the Full Gospel and serve its Young Pastors Division, decades after my mentor at UM had first pulled me toward that shore. What began as an influence on my formation became, in time, a fellowship I could claim as my own.

All of it, the gospel gumbo of my youth, the mentorship that pointed me toward Full Gospel before I had words for it, the reconciliation work in Mississippi, the ecumenical commissions, the commemorative gathering at Mt. Helm, has culminated in this new assignment as founding director of the Full Gospel’s Office of Ecumenical Engagement. Bishop Joseph Warren Walker III leads a fellowship that sits, quite naturally, at the intersection of the very traditions that formed me: Baptist and Pentecostal, structured and Spirit-filled, charismatic and intellectual, rooted and reaching. I am not being asked to become someone new for this role. I am being asked to finally be fully myself in service to the wider body of Christ.

A Second Convergence

Full Gospel itself was born from this same impulse to gather. Thirty three years ago, Bishop Paul S. Morton had the courage to build a fellowship that said they did not have to choose. That founding was its own convergence, following in the footsteps of Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason a century earlier, another generation refusing to let denominational walls outlast the Spirit’s movement.

I believe we are arriving at another such moment. Millennials and Gen Z believers are hungry in a similar way. They are seeking spiritual renewal and revitalization, and they are deeply resistant to being boxed in by inherited categories that feel smaller than the God they are encountering. Full Gospel has an extraordinary opportunity here, the chance for a kind of resurgence of what happened three decades ago, this time carried by a new generation of leaders who, like Jones, like Mason, like Morton before them, are declaring that the kingdom is bigger than our denominational maps and that the Spirit is doing something that refuses to be boxed in.

I share all of this not to recount an autobiography but to speak a word to anyone who has ever felt like a spiritual mutt, an ecclesial in between, too Pentecostal for the Baptists and too Baptist for the Pentecostals, too structured for the charismatics and too free for the traditionalists. I want to say to you plainly: you are not odd. You are not weird. You are not confused. You are a trailblazer, and the very hybridity that has made you hard to categorize may be the exact instrument God intends to use to gather what has been scattered.

The church has spent centuries building walls between traditions that were never meant to be strangers to one another. Somebody has to be willing to stand in the doorway. Somebody has to be able to speak Baptist ecclesiology and Pentecostal pneumatology in the same breath without feeling like a traitor to either. Somebody has to remember that Baptist pastors nCharles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason once gathered as one before history and human frailty pulled them apart, and that what was divided can, by the same Spirit, be gathered again.

Charles Price Jones himself said it best when he declared that denominationalism is slavery. Not denomination itself, which can be a faithful house for the Spirit to dwell in, but denominationalism, the hardened insistence that one’s house is the only house. The historian Jaroslav Pelikan made a kindred observation about tradition more broadly, noting that tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Jones was naming in ecclesial terms what Pelikan named in historical ones. The line between a tradition that lives and a tradition that has calcified into a prison is not the tradition itself. It is whether the Spirit is still free to move within it.

That has always been my assignment, to stand in that line and insist the Spirit remains free. Now it has an office, a title, and a fellowship wide enough to hold it. I step into this work as a bridge, a reconciler, an ambassador, grateful for every tradition that shaped me, and I believe we are on the edge of a revival, a restoration, a renewal that neither Baptist nor Pentecostal alone could carry, but that a gathered and convergent church might. The prophet Isaiah gave us the picture toward which all of this bends: for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). That is the river I saw cascading down the mountain all those years ago. That is the river I am still being gathered into, and still gathering others toward, until the waters cover the earth and the glory is unmistakable.