Book Recommendation: Friendship at the Margins

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Chris Rice

My friends Chris Heuertz and Christine Pohl just published a wonderful new book — Friendship at the Margins: Discovering Mutuality in Service and Mission.  Too often church mission becomes about aid (“we’re the solution”), out-sourcing risk and sacrifice to professionals, or sight-seeing.  This book casts a beautiful vision of mission as friendship, as companionship with Christ and with the stranger, as the ground where we both bear and encounter Christ.

Christine is professor of Church in Society at Asbury Seminary.  Chris, with his wife Phileena, is co-international director of Word Made Flesh, which plants communities of hope among the poorest of the poor throughout the world (they were the Center for Reconciliation’s Visiting Practitioner Fellows in 2007).  Chris wears tattoos.  Though Christine may not stick out in a crowd, she is a wise and gentle servant of the church—her book Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition is a classic.

This is book four in the Center for Reconciliation’s joint Resources for Reconciliation Series with InterVarsity Press (see the video).   The books are accessible, short, full of stories and practical examples, and each pairs a co-author team of practitioner and theologian—Living Gently in a Violent World by Jean Vanier and Stanley Hauerwas, Welcoming Justice by John Perkins and Charles Marsh, and Reconciling All Things by me and my colleague Emmanuel Katongole.

What co-author “Dream Team” would you like to see write for the Series?

About the Author: Chris Rice is co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School.  He is author of Reconciling All Things, Grace Matters, and More Than Equals. He writes regularly at the blog Reconcilers.

Related Reconcilers Posts: How a Small Band of College Grads Became a $2 Million Global Ministry Without Losing Their Soul

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