| When I began working at Christianity Today, I knew almost nothing about the contemporary evangelical world. I had a degree in religion, several years of experience covering faith for newspapers, and just a couple years of evangelical church membership under my belt, having come to Christ not long before. I soon learned on the job how much I was missing. There were swaths of popular preachers, Bible teachers, authors, and Christian artists I’d never heard of. I felt so disconnected from the church at large, like I’d never have the deep ties to the faith that I saw in sources and colleagues who grew up evangelical. But God has a way of making much with little. Again and again, God has used what seems like my limited church background to connect me with the Body of Christ beyond what I could have ever expected. This came up a few years ago, when I spent two weeks reporting in Cambodia. Many of the Christians I met there belonged to the same denomination I did—the Christian and Missionary Alliance—which was prominent in that country, but less-known in the states. While in Cambodia, I also met a handful of American NGO workers—including two who were friends with people I went to church when I first came to faith years before back in Houston. It felt so strange to be halfway across the world talking with people who knew some of my closest Christian friends. I lived in Houston just three years, but God has disproportionately multiplied the connections I made there. It happened again last week when one of my Houston friends, now a church planter in a Hispanic neighborhood in the city’s East End, shared posts from fellow ministry leaders he knew memorializing George Floyd. I reached out the leaders he knew and wrote about their experience doing ministry with “Big Floyd” in the Third Ward, where he lived most of his life. I hadn’t read anywhere else about Floyd’s ministry involvement, and I was honored as a journalist to bring this part of his life into the narrative around another black man whose tragic death made him a hashtag. Pastor “PT” Ngwolo and fellow leaders had met Floyd at a hip-hop benefit concert. I later realized that I had overseen coverage of that event—including an interview with Pastor Ngwolo—while I ran the religion section of the Houston Chronicle website a decade before. The mission he spoke about then was the same as the mission he shared with me last week: a desire to reach people in their neighborhood and see the gospel transform their lives. Only this time, I heard about how Floyd was a part of that. Of course, a victim need not be a fellow believer, a good person, or any other criteria to deserve to be treated justly and with value. But knowing someone’s connections to the Body of Christ—the role that God equipped them to play in his church and the faith we share—helps us to recognize the myriad of ways the Lord is at work. We know that he, like us, was part of something bigger, as “God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be” (1 Cor. 12:18). I know that many may have already read my account of Floyd’s unique role as a “person of peace” in the Houston projects. If you were struck by Ngwolo’s remarks about Cain and Abel and the slaughter of the innocent, I’d also recommend to you this sermon inspired by his friend’s death. “He was getting training so he could come back to his neighborhood and make it a brotherhood. That demon of racism cut him down in the prime of his life. Why? Because he’s trying to stop the advancement of God’s kingdom,” he preached. “George's life was an inflection point in our history. We are either going to master the sin of racism, or the sin of racism will master us.” | 