Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical's Inside View of White Christianity

Despite political strides toward racial reconciliation since 1964, many blacks feel that nothing has really changed since Jim Crow days. Some also worry that the church which should be leading efforts in racial reconciliation is one of the worst offenders in fostering racial division. Gilbreath, an editor-at-large for Christianity Today , offers a poignant and often humorous look at the state of racial reconciliation within evangelical Christianity specifically. Part memoir and part history of the struggle, Gilbreath chronicles his own faltering attempts as a young man to deal with this issue. His own life changed when he read Tom Skinner's 1968 autobiography, Black and Free . Skinner, an evangelical Christian convert who had once been a gang leader in Harlem, helped Gilbreath see how he could reconcile his evangelical identity with the church's dysfunctional approaches to race and social justice. Gilbreath now believes that he can no longer walk away from conversations about race and his own racial identity in a mostly white evangelical church. Regrettably, the book ends with the passive notion that no matter how much we strive to bring about racial reconciliation, we must trust God to bring about change. In spite of this disappointing conclusion, Gilbreath's recovery of Tom Skinner's work is worth the price of the book. (Dec.)

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