A primarily black church and a primarily white church came together Sunday for their first SWAP Sunday service.

Greater Grove Street Missionary Baptist Church hosted a service that featured worship led by Greater Grove Street M.B. Church and a sermon delivered by Elevate Church’s pastor Robert Andrews.

Andrews said he and Rev. Dr. Casey D. Fisher of Greater Grove have been friends for years and they wanted to come together to promote unity.

“Just like pastor Casey said in the service, it seems like 11 a.m. is the most segregated time in America, especially in the South,” he said. “We might be different on the outside, but we all bleed the same blood, and Jesus died for all of us.”

Andrews said promoting unity is especially important in Vicksburg.

“It just brings everyone together,” he said. “That’s how Jesus intended it to be. Every tongue, every tribe and every nation coming together just to worship him, to worship Jesus.”

Andrews said the service was great and they plan to do something similar again in the future.

“It would be good if we could all just learn to look past each others’ skin color and see people the way God sees them,” he said. “I just think this world would be a completely different place.”

Fisher said this idea was forged by “two pastor friends who decided a few years ago to fellowship with each other to try to break the racial barriers in Vicksburg, Miss. by coming together to worship together.”

Fisher said in the past the two congregations have come together for Wednesday night worship services and a cleanup fellowship at Greater Grove.

“They came and helped us out and that’s where the bond initially started,” he said. “Me and the pastor knew each other, but the initial time the churches met was at the East Center cleanup.”

Quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fisher said, “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.”

Fisher said he and pastor Andrews are both in tune to that fact.

“It’s sad to say that up north, in bigger cities, mixed congregations are just something there is, but in the Deep South it’s a rarity to see mixed congregations,” he said. “It’s not for me to say there’s something wrong with that, but we need to do something. If race relations are going to get better, the church has to lead the way.”

Fisher said people have different complications but they all had the same insides.

“You can’t be a racist and a Christian,” he said.

Fisher gestured to the mixed congregation and said that was what heaven was going to look like.

“He preached a powerful message today that it was the inside of David that mattered, not the outside,” he said. “Pastor Andrews, he’s younger than me, and I see a lot of him in me in where he is in his ministry. For both to see that God is not a God that has a color or a race, he just created that in his glory that he made us different, but we want the same thing.”

Evangelist Mable Jennings of Greater Grove said she enjoyed hearing Andrews’ message.

“I think it’s wonderful, and we should do it more often,” she said. “It makes us aware that God created all of us in his image.”

Joe McAllister of Elevate said he thoroughly enjoyed the church service at Greater Grove.

“I personally think it helps bring the community together and it helps everybody to be one in God and be one in Christ,” he said.