The Gospel Torn in Two

A few weeks after our Christmas at the DPAC, I visited Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Church, a quaint chapel one town over from Durham in Hillsborough, North Carolina. This place was never a megachurch, but 150 years ago it was the DPAC of its day. North Carolina’s elite donated the land and built this chapel in 1824. Their children intermarried, and by the end of the Civil War a member of the church, Paul Cameron, was the wealthiest man in North Carolina. He owned most of the land that is now Durham County and nearly a thousand enslaved human beings…

Thomas Ruffin donated the land where…