told me with a smile, “I don’t ‘steal sheep’ from other churches, but I do like to leave my gate wide open.” The embarrassing truth is that sometimes even I didn’t want to show up for a service—that’s how bad it was. Whether that was a valid approach or not, it took money, so forget it—nobody would come to downtown Brooklyn for the little honorarium we could afford. Moreover, Carol and I had frankly admitted to each other that unless God broke through, the Brooklyn Tabernacle was doomed. We couldn’t
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