Before you read anything else, take a sheet of paper and write down, word for word, the first sentence you would say if the person you love brought up their new faith at dinner tonight. Don’t polish it. Write what would actually come out of your mouth. Then fold the page and set it somewhere you will find it again.
Now hold that sentence next to one observation. Vocab Malone has spent years in conversation with Hebrew Israelites, on the street and over meals, and he reports this about them: “Every single one I met grew up in the church.” Chris Broussard, the Fox Sports analyst who founded the King Movement, says the same about a wider circle: “Most members of the conscious community, most people who are black Hebrew Israelites, most members of the nation of Islam grew up in the church.” If your sentence was written for a stranger who fell for something foreign, it was probably written for the wrong person.
What follows is a course in reaching that person without losing them to an argument, and its order is deliberate. First you learn to look at your friend before their position. Then you learn to say the true part of their complaint out loud. Only then do you study what they actually believe, and finally you practice a patience that can outlast many conversations. Each movement has Scripture to read closely, witnesses to weigh, an exercise to carry out and one small action for the week. At the end you will unfold that page and find out what changed.