Missions Resources - Bibliography
Gracism: The Art of Inclusion
Authors: David Anderson
ISBN: 0830834400
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 167
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
From month to month the American racial conversation staggers from one blowup to the next—public brawls alternating with lengthy drafts of frosty non-communication. It’s been going on for decades, and at a shrill enough level to hide a much more meaningful movement: Real conversation, real honesty, and real reconciliation. It’s really taking place.
Some amazing stories are developing in the American church in the area of multiethnicity and racial reconciliation. David Anderson’s book Gracism opens the door on this brilliant story.
Anderson’s main point is one of extending unmerited favor to one another, as we try to follow Christ’s example of the same. Just as Jesus picked some very unpromising people as his disciples, we are also, as “gracists,” to shower blessings on each other because of (not in spite of) our race and culture.
By subtly inverting the calcified debates around Affirmative Action, and by restricting his focus to the church, Anderson can invite people to the table who would rarely otherwise break bread with each other.
The reality is that we have widely different life experiences, and that many of these experiences play out along racial and cultural lines. Even if race is a social (not biological) construct, this construct nevertheless shapes our experiences of God, of family, of community, and of the meaning of human actions. We live in a sinful world, a world in which all of our ways of thinking are twisted in various ways. Accordingly, we need each other. We are incomplete, and our very worship ignorant, when we worship without one another. The trick is how. How can we live with one another?
David Anderson brings a wealth of real experience to this problem, as pastor of a multiethnic church. Drawing on the Apostle Paul’s illustration from 1 Corinthians of the church as a single body with different body parts, Anderson discusses how to treat different parts in the most appropriate ways—protecting some, honoring others, treating some with special modesty, etc. The end result is common-sensical and practical while remaining visionary.
As a long-term minority member of my own church, I tend to approach these books with skepticism—perhaps too much. But David Anderson impresses. This is a book for people who might no longer believe multiethnicity is possible this side of heaven: Anderson will remind you of the hope you once had. And for the countless numbers of us who are trapped in the shame loop, where we’re told to simultaneously notice and ignore race—and to simultaneously act and restrain from acting on our beliefs about race, David Anderson provides a believable way out.
Paul Grant
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