The back story of the ballot measure is as surprising as the margin of victory. In 2015, the national policing controversy arrived in Cincinnati when a police officer killed an unarmed black man. Mr. Mingo, who is black, felt called to be a voice for racial reconciliation. With the approval of the head pastor of Crossroads, who is white, a six-week program on racial reconciliation called Undivided was born. Participants were placed in small, multiracial groups where they held meaningful conversations and connect to fundamental truths about being Christians.

One of the first participants in the 1,200-person cohort was Carolyn Heck, a white evangelical. In 2015, she felt paralyzed by the racial divisions she saw in her city. She did not know how to connect her faith to her feelings of complicity with racism and was not active in politics.

“The first session was really emotional — I felt a weight confronting my own implicit subconscious biases about black and brown people,” Ms. Heck said in an email. She was surprised that she became uncomfortable and unsettled right away. “I quickly realized that much of what I had taken for granted was not the norm for black people in my own church. I had privilege stacked upon privilege.”

Cameron Smedley, a black Christian, was skeptical at first. “I was used to being shut down, discredited or having whites change the subject when things got real around race,” he said in an email. But he wanted to finally bring his full self to church. “I not only heard from black leaders, but heard white leaders telling the truth about racial history and the transformative power of empathy,” he wrote.

And so it went over six weeks together, as groups shared personal stories, wrestled with the racial wealth gap and housing discrimination and grounded themselves in the practices of empathy, listening, love and grace. During the last session, when everyone shared a meal in a home, Ms. Heck broke down in tears. “I felt ill-equipped to lead or contribute to address racism. My group listened and encouraged me,” she said, and “called out the ways I had grown during the program. These relationships continue to this day.”