Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I got an out-of-print, used copy of this hardbound edition for my birthday this month, and finished reading it yesterday (12/22/11).

Back in the 1990s, when I was enrolled at large, renewedly (to coin a word that has little to do with what Evangelicals typically mean by the term, "renewal") conservative seminary, I was pretty interested in racial reconciliation. I'd moved East and South from the Pacific Northwest where I'd served in a ghetto youth ministry and a skid-row alcohol/drug rehab center. My only Christian friends in that city were black people. Other white Christians had ideas, attitudes, motivations that made no sense to me. Moving across the country I found that continued to be the case.

Somewhere I must have heard about these guys, Perkins and Rice. I recall at one point exchanging emails with someone at Reconcilers' Fellowship about a Christian Ethics class paper I'd written. Then the whole thing dropped off the map, so to speak, out of my awareness. And for me, I became disengaged from a woman I'd planned to marry, courted and became engaged to another woman of my own race and married her. I became completely disillusioned with the denominational voc-tech training approach to seminary education foisted upon students at my school and found I could not continue. As I read Rice's date and detail-rich account of his time, I reflected upon the events of my own life at those times. The history of my own life since the mid-1990s has been the story of my gradual reabsorption into a culture the fringes of which I'd been born, and a gradual awakening to humanness from an almost problematic detachment.

But Rice's history is the story of what it means to be church, a translation of the human being from culture of origin into the culture of the cross. The lessons contained in this book are, in my opinion, pertinent whether the believer is of the conviction that "Church" must be lived in "Community" or meeting for worship in a run-down storefront. Confrontation, fear, truth, commitment, loyalty, betrayal, forgiveness within the context of a fellowship of Christian believers in the presence of The Living God has the power to change world in the most humble circumstances. Rice quotes a guy named John (of the tie-dyed shirts) who talked to the Antioch community about "maturing downward," and it is my opinion that is something akin to what Christ modeled through incarnation ending in apparent total humiliation and crushing defeat at the cross.

Now, the other thing this book clearly describes is the tendency of Christians "on a mission" to forgo one of the basic and most necessary activities of self-care for people living under stress while attempting to serve others out of one's own intellectual, moral, and spiritual resources - seeking counsel. Toward the end of their time together, the Antioch group appears to have done this, but they might have benefited had they done so sooner.

A couple of years ago, my family and I moved into a large house in a nice neighborhood near a country-club. I at first thought my presence in this neighborhood was God's joke on the people already inhabiting this place. I am coming to think, however, that it is God's joke on me. Changing my address has changed my life and my attitudes in a way that has made me aware of not only my class/intellectual/racial chauvinism or racialism (a term Rice quotes from Perkins, but applies it to blacks), but also my comfort with the racial divide prevalent in the United States at this time. A sort of twisted comfort in the fact that I benefit from the overt racism of others.

In this book, Rice names, faces, and grapples with the demons that formerly (or possibly still do - it's an old book that I've only just read) beset him. And in the reading of this book, Rice (or the Rice of 2002) is reminding me of my own in a way that goads me to turn them out. For that, Rice, I say "Thanks."

I gave the book four stars, not because I didn't like it or find it of real value, but because one of my quirks is a real or imagined tendency to read between the lines, and I think there's stuff that Rice has written here the import of which he may not have been aware when writing. Although the book has what seems like two or three epilogues, I'd be interested in some follow-up material. And reading between the lines, like I think I do, I think there's a lot Rice left out that would have been instructive and useful.

Chris Rice is brutally vulnerable and honest about his attempts to achieve the goal of racial reconciliation in partnership with Spencer Perkins. And, while the goal is important, the means of achieving it takes center stage in this poignant and absorbing chronicle of life in an intentional biracial community. Chris and Spencer discover that, when it comes right down to it, the only way they can overcome their own personal hangups and self-centeredness, and achieve true reconciliation between them, is by fully accepting God's grace. As they accept God's grace, they become transformed people who are whole, healed, and capable of truly seeking the best for others. The book clearly documents the work of God in the deep, private recesses of peoples' lives. It should be read by anyone who wants to achieve lasting change in their own life and the world around them.

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.