Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South [Hardcover]

Chris P. Rice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2002

"Here is a real story of real people and real faith. The story of friendship between Chris Rice and my son Spencer and their work of racial reconciliation and healing represents the heart of the Christian witness. My prayer is that the 'seeds' of this story of struggle and hope they planted will spread and bloom and grow in the lives of many people." - John Perkins, chairman, Christian Community Development Association and author, "Let Justice Roll Down". "Grace is the most potent counter force at work in our violent species, and our only hope. Chris Rice gives a very personal account, at once inspiring and disturbing, of its transforming power." - Philip Yancey, author, "What's So Amazing About Grace?" "Chris Rice has a keen eye for detail and a gift for setting a scene. This remarkable, inspiring story he tells reads like a good novel. It is a story of powerful Christian faith, intense personal commitment, and maddening human frailty. But more than anything else, and though it ends in tragedy, this is a story of hope: My encounter with "Grace Matters" has left me daring to hope that, even at this late date, we Christians might yet live out the true meaning of our radical creed in regard to relations between blacks and whites in the United States." -Glenn C. Loury, director, Institute on Race and Social Division, Boston University. "In a rare and deeply significant way, Chris Rice honestly probes the difficult but essential journey toward genuine racial reconciliation. It is confessional, candid, and even painful as the author bares his soul and his struggles...This is a book with a fundamental and hopeful message - that grace can become a way of life." - Jim Wallis, editor, Sojourners and convener, Call to Renewal. ""Grace Matters" is an extraordinary love story that is improbable as it was difficult. That a black man and a white man might be joined in a common love of God in Mississippi defies the imagination. But Chris Rice has helped us see that friendship-indeed a difficult friendship-is possible just to the extent a community existed in which truth mattered. Hopefully this book will be read and read widely, not simply to inform us about 'race relations' but because the story told here is one of hope and perseverance that hopefully will make more friendships possible." - Stanley Hauerwas, author of "A Community of Character" and named by "Time" magazine as America's Best Theologian.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Chris Rice, a columnist for the Christian Sojourner magazine, takes on a memoirist's voice as he builds a dramatic story of racial harmony. Grace Matters begins in the early 1980s as Rice takes on a daunting role--that of a white man working within a predominately black church to help heal racial tension in Jackson, Mississippi. As a new member of the Voice of Calvary Church, Rice attends one of his first meetings. Here is where he meets the man who will eventually become his co-author of the award-winning book More Than Equals:

Then Spencer Perkins rose from his seat at the back of the church ... Spencer's eyes narrowed. His voice was gruff, defiant and confident. "What I want to know," he said, "is, what are all you white people doin' here?" That's all he said.... All lessons about how to win friends and influence people went right out the window. With one quick sentence, Spencer Perkins iced over the sunny land of my racial idealism.

As this memoir unfolds, we are privy to a magnificent friendship between two men of different races and extremely different backgrounds who discover that they each have tough spiritual lessons to teach one another. Eventually the story pans outward from the fiery friendship, as the duo helps to build an inspirational and interracial church community that brings "a culture of grace" to an impoverished inner-city neighborhood. Few would have thought that this kind of racially inclusive Christianity could have been accomplished in the Deep South. Rice not only shows that it's been done, he offers a testament to how it can be done again and again. --Gail Hudson

From Publishers Weekly

In this extraordinarily candid memoir, nobody is spared Rice's penetrating scrutiny, least of all himself. His account begins in 1981, when Rice, a white student took what he thought would be a brief break from Middlebury College to volunteer with the Voice of Calvary Ministries in West Jackson, Miss. It ends 18 years later when he finally did leave. In the intervening years, Rice fell passionately in love with the fight for racial reconciliation (especially among evangelical Christians), and devoted himself to it by living in an interracial commune called Antioch and developing a public ministry with his best friend, the late Spencer Perkins. More than anything, this book chronicles the stormy, often all-consuming relationship between these two men, who referred to themselves as "yokefellows." Perkins, the son of civil rights activist John Perkins, comes across as a flawed genius. His repeated failures as an administrator in various ministries contrast with his steadfastness as a friend, his unswerving faith and his gifts as a writer and public speaker. Rice portrays himself as an achievement-oriented perfectionist who suffers besetting jealousy of Perkins's attention-getting blackness, charisma and family ties. An antidote to every evangelical depiction of dramatic transformation upon conversion, this confessional autobiography shows how a household full of mature, radical Christians took more than a decade to learn one of the most rudimentary lessons of faith: that grace is the essence of Christian community.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (September 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787957046
• ISBN-13: 978-0787957049
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,212,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last! the truth about interracial friendship, October 29, 2002

By 

Sharyn Dowd (Waco, Texas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South (Hardcover)

This memoir by Chris Rice is important, not because of the people involved, though they are in the forefront of evangelical ministry with the poor. It is important because for the first time someone is being brutally honest about what real relationships across the black-white chasm will cost and why they are worth the effort. This is no sugary, "Can't we just all get along" picture of the ideal "brotherhood of man." This is a chronicle of misunderstanding, miscommunication, determination, reconciliation and forgiveness. But finally, the story of Antioch Community and the friendship of Spencer Perkins and Christ Rice is about grace--God's grace working through flawed and struggling Christians who are radical enough to take the Sermon on the Mount as a call to lifestyle and mission.

Everybody who is interested in miinistry with the poor, racial reconciliation, Christian community and social justice should read this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grace Matters, February 19, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South (Hardcover)

This is an important book about human relationships and how conditioning must be transcended to allow a new order of humanity to emerge. Chris's honesty is remarkable and refreshing. The forces against human beings coming together are big - the black/white racial issue just further highlights what most of us try to pretend isn't there. Their willingness to trust in God and something bigger than themselves because they know how important it is for the sake of humanity, is very moving and should not be missed. This is an unusual book because although the foundational faith is Christianity, the issues are human and can be appreciated by anyone interested in solving the complex issues of what it means to be a human being.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So Honest a book!!, November 14, 2002

By 

George Yancey (Fort Worth, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grace Matters: A True Story of Race, Friendship, and Faith in the Heart of the South (Hardcover)

What a tremendously honest book. There are no shortcuts to true racial reconciliation and justice. Attempts at shortcuts usually lead to a perpetuation of racial injustice or merely a reversal of who is oppressed. Reading "Grace Matters" clearly indicates this truism. Most of the books on race relations are dogmatic about the ultimate solutions there are to racial harmonty. This book is a more honest reflection of the struggles we will have to undergo so that racial reconciliation is possible. Rice does not make himself the "hero" of this book. He freely reveals the ugly side of himself. But just as important he does not deify Spencoer Perkins - his best friend in the book who is black - or blacks in general. This is a real book about real people.
If you want to just rely on those who pretend that they know all of the answers to racism, from color-blind whites to afrocentric blacks, then this book is not for you. The answers in this book are not offered through an unrealistic idealism but through the blood, sweat and tears that happen when people of different races really start working at racial healing. So if you want to gain a little sense of the type of struggle that we are going to have to undergo to eliminate racism then go get this book as soon as you can.