Missions Resources - Bibliography
Living in Color: Embracing God's Passion for Diversity
Authors: Randy Woodley
ISBN: 0830832556
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 217
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
view this book on InterVarsity Press' site
Reviewed by Paul Grant
Randy Woodley is a leading activist and pastor in North America, most well known as a Native American pastor with a message for all Americans. He has recently honored InterVarsity as the guide for the Cherokee Trail of Tears segment of the Pilgrimage for Reconciliation.
In that capacity, Woodley has spent the last two summers leading teams of InterVarsity staff along the route of his ancestors' forced migration from the East Coast to Oklahoma in the mid nineteenth century. As a guide along a trail involving ethnic cleansing, massacres, concentration camps that served as models for the Nazi regime in the twentieth century, slavery and personal betrayal and treachery, Woodley has had to look hard into the face of evil.
But he remains a warm and joyful saint, the depth of whose soul contains supernatural love. His vision is global while remaining grounded in real experience. He knows that the atrocities committed by the people of America against the Cherokee are both very wretched and unexceptional. Ethnic warfare is perhaps the normal, default state of fallen human societies.
Living in Color is Randy Woodley’s sermon to the North American Church. It is a message of hope, not guilt, but never once does Woodley water down his challenge. Living in Color is both an indispensable essay on the spirituality of ethnicity and reconciliation, and a how-to guide for the bewildered. Woodley has figured out how to challenge the jaded experts without crushing the spirits of the tenderfeet.
The book reads like a series of fireside chats between master and pupil. The discussion drifts in and out of lectures on the Bible, stories from Woodley’s life, casual asides, pointers for next steps, and stunning conclusions drawn from all the above. What felt like an informal conversation, turns out to have been a master’s strategy. He teaches with both eyes on the pupil, monitoring every thought and emotion. Simply put, Living in Color is highly recommended.
Woodley opens the book with a Bible study: a discussion on the theology of
diversity. Moving far beyond the standard top-ten Bible verses approach to
multiethnicity, he demonstrates the relationship between the diversity
of human experience (including culture) and the ability of a finite human to
understand an infinite God. As anyone who has lived overseas can verify, being
in community with believers of another culture can teach you a lot about the
character of Jesus.
It is no surprise then, that God’s gift of variety of human experience
has been perverted into a principle device of human division and hatred. What
God meant as a means of life humans have reshaped into a weapon of mass destruction.
Woodley dedicates a chapter to the “subtleties of racism”, showing
through the case study of English history how the victim can become the perpetrator.
The danger of becoming devoured by the same evil we seek to extinguish is ever
present, and forces us into a posture of complete dependence on God.
Not one to keep the reader dangling in the abstract, Woodley concludes with several chapters on restoration, including some of the most useful tips for beginners on the multiethnic journey. Newly reprinted, this second edition includes a study guide to help groups process the book.
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