Voice of Calvary
Mendenhall, Mississippi
After attending Middlebury College in Vermont, Chris Rice’s life took a dramatic turn when he lived and worked 17 years in an inner-city neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi with Voice of Calvary, an interracial church and Christian community-development ministry. For 12 of those years he lived in an intentional Christian community called Antioch. In 1993, he co-authored More than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel, with his African-American colleague Spencer Perkins. He has since served as co-director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation and published Grace Matters, a memoir of his Mississippi journey, and Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision of Justice, Peace, and Healing with Emmanuel Katongole.
Rice's life and writing have been concerned with the difference Christianity can make in a divided world, in local places. Here, he discusses racial reconciliation and his work in the Antioch community in Mississippi.