What we need today is a radical reengineering of the church. There is a growing need to go back to the drawing board and devise new ways of “doing church.”

When you pray for something or someone, by default, you think about them. And when you think about them, you find yourself wondering things. What do they need? What do they want? What scares them? What makes them angry? What do they hope for? It’s then that you begin to see them in a different light. You come to understand their motivations in a new way.

No party or ideology has a monopoly on the solutions to ending poverty in America, and both parties are to blame for expending more energy on policies aimed at the upper and middle classes at the expense of people in poverty. With a few exceptions, neither Republicans nor Democrats have prioritized pushing forward a comprehensive policy agenda to combat poverty.

As a seminal event in Baptist life, the first gathering of the New Baptist Covenant was historic—not because this meeting marked a transition from injustice and division to reconciliation and unity, but because it showed us a vision of what could be if we were willing to put in the sweat equity to bring the vision into being.