Abstract
At its core, Welcoming Justice is about long-term discipleship and deep wisdom gathered through the experiences of real communities. The relationship between University of Virginia professor Charles Marsh and minister/activist John M. Perkins embodies one building block in the beloved community this book announces and models.
Welcoming Justice is insightful, easy to read, and practical in its discussion of racial and economic justice. If you are looking for a book to motivate a church group about the necessity of community development, or if you are an academic navigating scholarship, activism, and ministry, then this book is one of the best resources you can find. Good community development starts with the very old and the very young (116). Churches exist in physical space, so a commuter congregation will not effectively develop their community. “No one ever put a chain on another human being without tying the other end to them self” (48). As a successful activist, Perkins is always tweetable.
A potential shortcoming is the book’s limited scope. There are inspiring claims about justice throughout, but the variety welcomed most specifically is the reconciliation of black and white Americans through the Church. Of course, it is also exactly this focus which makes the extensive personal experience of the authors and their conclusions so insightful.
A necessary byproduct of squeezing the lives of two active saints into a book is that the narratives of lived theology will breach their media. Originally released in 2009 and containing multiple references expressing hope for how President Obama’s leadership would shape the country, the 2018 edition begins with Marsh describing the Unite the Right rally by his own campus in Charlottesville, VA. While the first edition sources inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the second edition Marsh adds the protest scenes and governmental apathy he had previously only heard about from Perkins.
No matter the specific time and place, there are universal takeaways from a senior prophet mentoring a more junior prophet. It is the form of this relationship: long drives together, shared struggles, and a common vision of the sacrificial gospel of Jesus Christ that the authors rely on to produce large-scale change.