They had met at a vigil after the mass shooting at a Charleston, S.C., church in June 2015. They had encountered each other at rallies to protest gun violence and domestic violence, to memorialize a long-ago lynching, to counter a Ku Klux Klan rally, to remember victims of the Orlando attack.

“We’ve had to come together so many times because of tragedy and heartbreak,” said the Rev. Michael Waters, pastor of the Joy Tabernacle A.M.E. Church.

As the first shots rang out Thursday evening in downtown Dallas, tragedy and heartbreak again brought them together. Waters spotted Imam Omar Suleiman in the crowd near the intersection of Market and Commerce streets, and together they fled what had quickly become a war zone.

The two men, along with Waters’s wife and several parishioners, sprinted to the nearby Omni Hotel. Waters, in a clergy collar and a T-shirt that read “Hope Dealer,” soon flagged down the driver of a Ford Excursion and offered him all of the cash in his wallet to take the group back to his church in South Dallas.

Suleiman, a nationally known Muslim scholar and one of two imams at the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, in Irving, piled into the SUV, in which parishioners were sitting on one another’s laps.

[Dallas gunman studied ‘shoot and move’ tactics, black nationalism]

At the Joy Tabernacle, on Holmes Street, the group turned on the news and called their families. Suleiman let his wife and two young children know he was okay. He went into the church’s sanctuary, alone, to say his sunset prayer.

“This wasn’t how I envisioned my first time at your church,” Suleiman told Waters, who weeks earlier spoke at Suleiman’s mosque.

It was about 10:30 p.m. when the small group at the church gathered in a circle inside a multipurpose room. Suleiman stood to Waters’s right, holding his hand. The pastor’s wife stood to his left.

“I remember praying for the protection of people who’d been unable to get away,” Waters recalled. “Praying for the officers that were shot and for their recovery. Praying for the families of the deceased. Praying for our city and for our nation.”

As the night wore on, the church grew quieter. Waters and his wife put their three children — a 9-year-old boy and two girls, ages 6 and 4 — to sleep in the church’s nursery.

About midnight, the two men of faith left the others and went to Waters’s office. Both sighed deeply and sat in silence for 10 seconds, then 20.

“This is going to set us back years,” Suleiman finally said. “This has the potential to delegitimize the cause.”

“We can’t keep going this way,” Waters said. “We can’t just get together in response to violence. We have to be proactive.”