The Best of Books on Multicultural Ministry and Intercultural Relationships

Kellemen’s Christian The Best of Guide: Making your life easier by finding, summarizing, evaluating, and posting the best resources on a wide variety of topics from a Christian perspective.

The Best of Books on Multicultural Ministry and Intercultural Relationships: Part One

Note: Excerpted from African American History, Life, Christianity, and Ministry: An Annotated Resource Guide, by Robert W. Kellemen, Ph.D., LCPC. For information on the full version please visit our Store. 

Anderson, David. Gracism: The Art of Inclusion. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007.

Pastor David Anderson builds a thoughtful, practical, balanced Christian approach to multiculturalism. He avoids the extremes of color-blindness and of affirmative action. Skillfully he explains the biblical injunction to care for the marginalized. Gracism is a must read for anyone who longs to build bridges leading to racial healing, harmony, and reconciliation. Its balance between theology, philosophy, and methodology makes it a uniquely practical manual.

Anderson, David. Multicultural Ministry: Finding Your Church’s Unique Rhythm. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004.

Pastor David Anderson has “been there, done that.” As a seasoned pastor of a multi-cultural church in a multi-cultural community, Pastor Anderson writes both with biblical insight and personal experience. A well-written, practical, and hopeful book, Multicultural Ministry is a foundational book for everyone interested in racial harmony and mutual ministry.

Anderson, David, and Brent Zuercher. Letters Across the Divide: Two Friends Explore Racism, Friendship, and Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001.

Pastor David Anderson and author Brent Zuercher have penned a groundbreaking and distinctive book. What happens when two friends of different races explore racism and faith? Letters across the Divide happens. For a firsthand account of what honest, open, bold, and loving multicultural relationships could look like, read this book.

Breckenridge, James, and Lillian Breckenridge. What Color Is Your God?: Multicultural Education in the Church. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995.

As the subtitle suggests, What Color Is Your God? educates pastors in foundational cultural understanding. Covering ethnic groups in America, this primer shows church leaders how to value cultural differences. It also highlights transcultural biblical principles and probes how various cultures apply or misapply these eternal principles in daily life.

Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth, Steve Kang, and Gary Parrett. A Many Colored Kingdom: Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004.

A Many Colored Kingdom provides ground breaking insight into the theology and methodology of spiritual formation from and in a multicultural perspective. The co-authors themselves live and breathe what they write, researching and writing with passion and precision. This book richly celebrates the diverse contributions to Christian spirituality necessary to fully engage and embrace the infinite, multifaceted beauty and glory of Christ.

Cooper, Rodney. We Stand Together: Reconciling Men of Different Color. Chicago: Moody, 1995.

We Stand Together would be a five-star book if it were not now somewhat dated. Editor Rodney Cooper is a leading Black Evangelical educator. Active in the 90s in the Promise Keepers’ movement, he surrounded himself with men of diverse ethnic groups to edit this primer on how men of different races can understand, forgive, reconcile with one another, and minister together.

Emerson, Michael. Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Please, don’t read this book without reading the “sequel” (see below): United by Faith.

Divided by Faith outlines the problem, as understood through a dissertation research project, of race relations in Evangelicalism in America in the 1990s. The results are troubling and at times could even produce hopelessness. However, facts are facts, and this sort of detailed quantitative and qualitative study is all-too-rare in Evangelical circles.

Emerson’s premise is that much of what White Evangelicals do to unite across racial lines end up being counter-productive. He does so by showing a concise history of Evangelical thought about racism from Colonial times to the Civil Rights movement. His core thesis is that most work done is too individualistic—one person trying alone to cross racial boundaries. His basic suggestion is the cross-cultural congregation. Unfortunately, until one reads United by Faith, how to accomplish this goal is left to the reader’s imagination—which may by now have been stunted by all the piles of statistics suggesting that Evangelical racial reconciliation is futile. However, the power of God, starting with one person’s commitment to cross-cultural relationships, can start a chain reaction—and lead to hope.

Emerson, Michael. United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Emerson has convened a multicultural team of co-authors to follow-up his earlier work Divided by Faith. In this work, Emerson argues that Evangelicals, when they have done anything at all to work toward racial reconciliation, have been to individualistic in their approach.

Emerson then argues that the biblical and effective approach is the multicultural congregation in which no one race makes up more than 80% of the congregation. The authors explain the biblical and social need for such congregations. They then follow with hope-giving success stories which provide the philosophy, principles, and practices necessary to obtain the biblical social vision of the multicultural people of God.

Implied, but not highlighted or extracted in detail, is the truth that such congregations can and should then do two things: 1.) Be a visible testimony exhorting the world to “go and do likewise.” 2.) Take a stand against societal racism and promote racial reconciliation and justice.

Kellemen, Robert W. and Karole A. Edwards. Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007.

Beyond the Suffering is a one-of-a-kind African American narrative. It is not simply a history of America, not simply a history of African Americans, not simply a history of African American Christianity, but a narrative of how African American Christians ministered to one another. As the title suggests, the book tells how African American believers helped one another to move beyond their horrific suffering to a place of healing and hope.

The characters are the African American believers themselves. The plot is their real-life battles told in their empowering words. The authors are a co-authoring team, one an African American female, the other a Caucasian male. Together, they embrace the legacy of how African Americans sustained, healed, reconciled, and guided one another in the faith.

Written in an engaging style that allows African Americans to tell their own story, Beyond the Suffering reads like a novel. It empowers African Americans and all people of all races and nationalities to love like Christ loved even in the worst of circumstances. Readers not only are riveted by the powerful historical chronicles, but are also equipped to apply soul care and spiritual direction principles to their own lives and ministries.

Important Stuff

*Your Guide: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., LCPC, is the Founder and CEO of RPM Ministries (www.rpmministries.org) through which he writes, speaks, and consults to equip God’s people to change lives with Christ’s changeless truth. He blogs daily here.

*My Necessary Disclaimer: Of course, I don’t endorse everything in every article, book, or link that you’ll find in Kellemen’s Christian The Best of Guide. I report, you decide.

*Your Suggestions Are Welcomed: Feel free to post comments and/or send emails (rpm.ministries@gmail.com) about resources that you think deserve attention in various categories covered in Kellemen’s Christian The Best of Guide.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Nineteen: Cross-Cultural Ministry

Welcome to day nineteen of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Nineteen: Cross-Cultural Ministry[1]

Long before multi-culturalism became fashionable, we find evidence of mutual worship and fellowship among blacks and whites. Though not the norm, we glean cultural competencies from these historical occurrences in which African American believers met their need for spiritual nurture with Caucasian believers.

Pulpit Ministry: Expounding the Scriptures Relevantly

Previously we met Solomon Northup—born free in Rhode Island, then kidnapped and enslaved in Louisiana from age thirty-three to forty-five. Though recognizing the inconsistency of his master, William Ford, a slave-owning Baptist preacher, Northup still notes:

“. . . it is but simple justice to him when I say, in my opinion, there never was a more kind, noble, candid, Christian man than William Ford.”

Northup details Ford’s pastoral ministry to his slaves. “We usually spent our Sabbaths at the opening, on which days our master would gather all his slaves about him, and read and expound the Scriptures. He sought to inculcate in our minds feelings of kindness towards each other, of dependence upon God—setting forth the rewards promised unto those who lead an upright and prayerful life. He spoke of the loving kindness of the Creator, and of the life that is to come.”

Pastor Ford related truth to life cross-culturally. Emphasizing the two great commandments, he taught Christians how to love one another and how to love God. Ford highlighted the character of God and the hope of heaven. Northup even recounts how Ford’s preaching led to the conviction and salvation of another slave, Sam.

Personal Ministry: Encouraging the Saints Relationally

Ford coupled his pulpit ministry with his personal ministry. Speaking of his time with Pastor Ford, Northup notes, “That little paradise in the Great Pine Woods was the oasis in the desert, towards which my heart turned lovingly, during many years of bondage.” Perhaps hard to imagine, but even in enslavement, even through ministry offered by a Baptist slave-owner, Northup experienced the ark of safety that is the “old ship of Zion.”

What was it about Ford’s life and ministry that so impacted Northup? During an extended trip by horseback and on foot to the Bayou, Ford “said many kind and cheering things to me on the way . . .” Ford knew how to speak life-giving words (Proverbs 18:21).

In exemplary fashion, Ford also used probing soul questions and spiritual conversations as he ministered to Northup. “He interacted with me in regard to the various fears and emotions I had experienced during the day and night, and if I had felt, at any time, a desire to pray. I felt forsaken of the whole world, I answered him, and was praying mentally all the while.”

Northup testifies to Ford’s relational competence. “So did that benignant man speak to me of this life and of the life hereafter; of the goodness and power of God, and of the vanity of earthly things, as we journeyed along the solitary road towards Bayou Boeuf.”

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. Pastor William Ford demonstrated cross-cultural competency in his pulpit. What specific aspects of his ministry could you emulate today?

2. Pastor William Ford demonstrated cross-cultural competency in his personal ministry. What specific aspects of his ministry could you emulate today?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Seven: Groaning to the Father of the Fatherless

Welcome to day seven of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Seven: Groaning to the Father of the Fatherless: Perpetual Lament[1]

In the gripping slave narratives, we find believers sharing their hurting hearts with their caring Savior. In their practice of the biblical art of lament, African American Christians clung to biblical imagery.

For example, Pastor Peter Randolph describes a mother named Jenny who grieves the loss of her children.

“So she (Jenny) commends them to the care of the God of the widow and the fatherless, by bathing her bosom in tears, and giving them the last affectionate embrace, with the advice to meet in heaven. Oh, the tears of the poor slave that are in bottles, to be poured out upon his blood-stained nation, as soon as the cup of wrath of the almighty Avenger is full, when he shall say, ‘I have heard the groanings of my people, and I will deliver them from the oppressor!’”

Painting Pictures of God onto the Palettes of Life Portraits

Enslaved African Americans survived by painting pictures of God onto the palettes of their life portraits. They viewed Him as the Father of the fatherless, as the God who collects their tears in his bottle of remembrance, and as God the just Judge avenging their suffering, hearing their cries, and delivering their souls.

While Solomon Northup lies in a slave pen with fifty fellow slaves, he prays a prayer of personal lament.

“My cup of sorrow was full to overflowing. Then I lifted my hands to God, and in the still watches of the night, surrounded by the sleeping forms of my companions, begged for mercy on the poor, forsaken captive. To the Almighty Father of us all—the freeman and the slave—I poured forth the supplications of a broken spirit, imploring strength from on high to bear up against the burden of my troubles, until the morning light aroused the slumberers, ushering in another day of bondage.”

His mouth vocalizing his pain and his eyes watching God, Northup draws a line in the sand of retreat. When everything inside screams, “Surrender hope!” he cries out to God lamenting the evils he is suffering while pleading for strength to endure. He teaches us that the will to survive is soaked in continual lament.

Fixing Your Eyes on the Hope of the Future: Heavenly Reunion

Randolph explains that given such earthly sorrow, enslaved African Americans ministered to one another by emphasizing heavenly reunion. “In parting with their friends at the auction-block, the poor blacks have the anticipation of meeting them again in the heavenly Canaan, and sing:

‘O, fare you well, O, fare you well! God bless you until we meet again; Hope to meet you in heaven, to part no more. Sisters, fare you well; sisters, fare you well; God Almighty bless you, until we meet again.’”

Enslaved Virginian, William Grimes, summarizes it best. “If it were not for our hopes, our hearts would break.” Knowing that they would never see one another again in this world, they set their sights on another world.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. The will to survive is soaked in continual lament. What does that mean to you? How could you practice its meaning in your life?

2. How could you apply the truth of biblical lament in your ministry to others who are grieving?

3. In what situations do you say, ‘If it were not for my hopes, my heart would break? How does God sustain you through future hope?

4. What image of God do you cling to when life attempts to batter and break you?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Six: Watered with Our Tears

Welcome to day six of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Six: Watered with Our Tears[1]

They arrived on two ships, one year apart. The second ship, the Mayflower, landed in 1620 with 102 Pilgrims seeking religious liberty. The first ship, a Dutch man-of-war, came ashore in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia, with twenty enslaved African men and women. Captain Jobe of the Dutch man-of-war bartered the seventeen men and three women for food to Sir John Rolfe’s Jamestown settlement. For the leaders of the Jamestown colony, Africans were mere commodities for European trade and servitude. In the land of the free, American slavery had begun.

Solomon Northup’s Narrative: The Hope of Years Blasted in a Moment

Solomon Northup lived free for thirty-three years in Rhode Island until he was kidnapped and enslaved for a dozen years in Louisiana. When he was first stolen, he spent two weeks in a slave pen where he met an enslaved woman named Eliza, her daughter Emmy, and her son Randall. His account of her separation from her children offers insight into the agony of deprivation, the need for hearing one another’s story, how not to empathize, and how to feel another’s pain.

Northup tells the story of Eliza’s life, as she related it to him, in great detail. After years of enslavement, she was promised her freedom and told that she was traveling to Washington, D.C. to receive her free papers. Instead, she was delivered to a trader named Burch.

“The hope of years was blasted in a moment. From the height of most exulting happiness to the utmost depths of wretchedness, she had that day descended. No wonder that she wept, and filled the pen with wailings and expressions of heart-rending woe.”

Spiritual Friendship 101

Of their enslavement together, Northup writes, “We were thus learning the history of each other’s wretchedness.” They participated in Spiritual Friendship 101 by practicing the arts of story sharing and story learning.

Northup and Eliza were eventually conducted to a slave pen in New Orleans owned by a Mr. Theophilus Freeman. A planter from Baton Rouge purchased Randall. All the time the trade was occurring, Eliza was crying aloud, wringing her hands, and begging that Freeman not buy Randall unless he also bought herself and Emmy.

When he answered that he could not afford them all, Eliza burst into paroxysm of grief, weeping plaintively. The bargain agreed upon; Randall had to go alone. “Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her—all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.”

In response, “Freeman damned her, calling her a blubbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place, and behave herself, and be somebody. He swore he wouldn’t stand such stuff but a little longer. He would soon give her something to cry about, if she was not mighty careful, and that she might depend upon.” His callousness models exactly what not to do when responding to another’s grief.

Northup, on the other hand, entered Eliza’s agony. “It was a mournful scene indeed. I would have cried myself if I had dared.”

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. Who has treated you like Freeman treated Eliza? Who has told you to “quit your blubbering,” and “I’ll give you something to cry about!” What impact did such insensitivity have on you?

2. Who has cared for your soul like Solomon Northrup cared for Eliza? Who has listened attentively to your earthly story of suffering? Who has mourned and wept with you and for you?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Day Five: Beauty from Ashes—The Intention of Jehovah

Welcome to day five of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Five: Beauty from Ashes—The Intention of Jehovah[1]

Captured and ruptured Africans needed Divine consolation teaching that it’s possible to hope because God is good. So they reminded each other that God weaves good for them even from human evil against them.

Such faith, as Quobna Cugoano believed, requires spiritual eyes like those of Joseph (Genesis 50:20).

“I may say with Joseph, as he did with respect to the evil intention of his brethren, when they sold him into Egypt, that whatever evil intentions and bad motives those insidious robbers had in carrying me away from my native country and friends, I trust, was what the Lord intended for my good.”

Cugoano makes the sweeping affirmation that, even in the face of human evil, God is friendly and benevolent, able and willing to turn into good ends whatever may occur. It is the belief that God squeezes from evil itself a literal blessing.

We can journey with our spiritual friends to the God of Joseph and Cugoano who Master-crafts every event of their lives to reveal his glory and bring them good. We can interact with them about the God who fashions for them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair (Isaiah 61:3).

Looking at Life with God’s Light

Olaudah Equiano taught his readers a similar lesson when he ended his narrative with these closing words of counsel. “I early accustomed my self to look at the hand of God in the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of importance. After all, what makes any event important, unless by it’s observation we become better and wiser, and learn ‘to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God!’”

Like Equiano, we practice spiritual friendship by reminding one another that God uses unjust suffering to make us more just, unloving treatment to make us more loving, and arrogant abusers to make us more humble. Like Equiano, we exercise spiritual discipline by orienting ourselves to detect God’s hand in every circumstance—no matter how seemingly minute.

Following the North Star

We follow the North Star guidance of the enslaved Africans’ responses to capture and rupture by reminding ourselves and our spiritual friends that we are never alone. Most of us would consider ourselves condemned prisoners in solitary confinement if we were stowed in the suffocating hold of a slave ship with little air, no portals, and no access to the outside world. Our African forebears teach us that there are always three open portals providing a way of internal release from captivity.

Portal One: God

Portal one is God—the God of all portals, the God of all comfort who comforts us in all our tribulations. Kidnapped from their homes and hijacked across the world, enslaved Africans encountered a wilderness experience that raised ultimate questions and brought them to a breaking point. On the brink between sanity and insanity, many encountered God—their good God who hears, sees, and cares. Theirs was a dual journey—away from their human home to their heavenly Home. As they journeyed, the chains still clanked, yet their hearts still hummed, or at least moaned.

Portal Two: God’s People

Portal two is people—when the God of all comfort comforts us, he does so in order that we can comfort one another with the comfort that we receive from him. Individually and corporately they tapped into the Holy Spirit at every turn. In bound community, they shared with one another the Spirit of God within them, their hope of glory. The collective gathering of the power of his presence in their inner being provided life-sustaining strength in the midst of death-bidding despair. The all-surpassing power of God (2 Corinthians 4:7-9) shared among these captured souls transformed them into “Jesus with skin on.”

Portal Three: Self—Trusting God

Portal three is self—not the self of self-sufficiency, but the self created in the image of God and infused with the Spirit of God. Ramming into the breakers of life, these enslaved men and women could break or conclude that there is no need to break. At their breaking point, those slaves who entrusted themselves to God discovered a bottomless resourcefulness that enabled them to transform physical bondage into spiritual freedom. Through God, they absorbed the ache of life without abandoning the ship of hope. Even while stowed like animals below deck, they saw the shining North Star of God with upturned eyes of faith looking out spiritual portals.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. How could the truth that “God is good even when life is bad” impact your life and ministry today?

2. Ponder an area of external suffering—something that you have endured that feels suffocating, like a prison sentence, like something out of a horror movie. Which of the three portals (God, others, self) could you open in order to stop letting your circumstances define you, in order to find the resiliency not to break when you hit the breakers of life?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at http://www.rpmministries.org/.

The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity

Welcome to day three of our forty-day intercultural journey. From Martin Luther King Day to the end of Black History Month we are focusing on The Journey: Forty Days of Promise—Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity.

Day Three: Encountering Every Misery for You[1]

Olaudah Equiano’s empathy for his sister was Herculean.

“Yes, thou dear partner of all my childish sports! thou sharer of my joys and sorrows! happy should I have ever esteemed myself to encounter every misery for you, and to procure your freedom by the sacrifice of my own!”

What a model of incarnational suffering. In his letter of spiritual consolation to his long-lost sister, he does more than say, “I understand your feelings.” He does more than say, “I feel what you feel.” He says, “I am willing to take on your pain—to encounter your every misery for you.

Equiano is reminiscent of the Apostle Paul who, in Romans 9:2-3, shares his great empathy and unceasing anguish for his Jewish brethren—feeling their feelings. In this passage, Paul wishes himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of his brothers—encountering their misery for them.

Like Paul and Equiano, we are to be “Jesus with skin on.” As Jesus pitched his tent among us, took on flesh, assumed the very nature of a servant, was made in human likeness, and became sin for us, so we must intimately engage our spiritual friends. Aloof, detached, arms-length ministry is neither biblical nor historical.

Hope Deferred Makes the Heart Sick: Candor

Eventually Equiano was sold to a wealthy widow with a son his age. After two months, he began to settle in, hoping that he had found a form of stability with his new family. However, his hope vanquished when he was stolen again. He rehearses his immeasurable despondency grasping for words to communicate what exceeds human language.

“Thus, at the very moment I dreamed of the greatest happiness, I found myself most miserable: and seemed as if fortune wished to give me this taste of joy only to render the reverse more poignant. The change I now experienced was as painful as it was sudden and unexpected. It was a change indeed from a state of bliss to a scene which is inexpressible by me . . . and wherein such instances of hardship and fatigue continually occurred as I can never reflect on but with horror.”

Have you been there? At the moment of your greatest happiness, life intrudes. Misery waltzes in. The poison of misfortune spoils your banquet of joy. If so, then what? Pretend? Ignore? Seek a diversion?

Equiano chooses candor. He chooses journaling. Both wise choices. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Heart sickness requires the biblical medicine of candor both with God and with self. Very often, such candor is most effective when pen hits paper and we write with honesty about the instances of hardship and fatigue that we experience.

It was during these evil circumstances, and many more to come, that Equiano acknowledged his heavenly Father’s good heart and Christ’s merciful providence in every occurrence of his life.

Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses

1. Who is “Jesus with skin on” for you? How does this person minister to you?

2. For whom are you “Jesus with skin on”? How do you minister to this person by encountering every misery for them?

3. In your life and in your ministry to others, how vital is candor—honesty with self and with God about the agonies of life lived in a fallen world?

4. In your life, where do you need spiritual eyes to trust God’s good heart in every occurrence of your life?

[1]Excerpted, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.