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Spencer Perkins , who died in 1998, was Chris Rice's coauthor on the book More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (IVP, 1993). He was also Rice's best friend. Now Rice tells the story of their friendship in Grace Matters (Jossey-Bass, purchase book here.)

The only time I've ever talked to you was in an interview with you and Spencer together for the book, More Than Equals. Writing this new book and doing interviews for it must bring memories of doing the same with him.

When your closest friend dies suddenly, the way that Spencer did, you just don't go on with life as usual. I shed a lot of tears writing [this book]. I had a lot of good laughs, too, remembering the very special friendship that we had. But I felt like I really had to get this story out of me in a sense before I could move on with my life.

Tell us a little about you and how you met Spencer.

Spencer's father came to speak at my college. John Perkins was the founder of this ministry [Voice of Calvary] in Mississippi that I'd never heard of. And so I decided to leave Middlebury in the middle of my junior year and volunteer for what I thought would be six months in Mississippi.

John is an amazing person: An African American who grew up in a sharecropping family and has received honorary doctorates from seven colleges and universities, an amazing Christian leader, an activist. He was dangerously concrete in his understanding of the gospel. Racial reconciliation was not just some theology. It was, "We've got to desegregate the Sabbath." So we were a group of white and black believers who were doing just that in an inner-city neighborhood in Jackson.

The neighborhood that we were relocating into was one that had been all white up until desegregation. And so it was in the midst of white flight as well. At that time Voice of Calvary was seen as a very radical organization by churches within Mississippi.

How many whites were part of it at that time?

There were never more than a couple hundred of us total. And half of us were white, half African American.

So you join Voice of Calvary and what are the first words out of the mouth of the guy who would become your best friend in life?

"What are all you white people doing here?" It was not a good beginning to our relationship.

Spencer was good at getting beyond the do-gooder mentality and challenging what people's real motives were. He was not very satisfied with white folks who had come thinking we were doing our good deed for poor black people and then we're returning to life as usual.

I was working very innocently up until then, thinking that I was part of the solution, and then we had this huge blowup within our congregation in 1983. Black people started speaking up in our church and saying, "We got racism to deal with right here within Voice of Calvary."

That was news to me. My idea of racists was people who wore hoods and threw black people out of their churches. I certainly had never done any of those things. I mean, I was even worshiping with black people. And here were people, who I thought were my friends, saying very confrontational things. Why was it that so many white people had come to be in charge of our different community development ministries? It was a very painful time in the life of our church.

How was it resolved?

It didn't end very cleanly. There was an exodus of members. There was unforgiveness. There was confusion. I think racial reconciliation is messy. But one of the things that surprised me greatly, as I was contemplating leaving, wondering if the doors had closed for my involvement, was that "Mr. Militant" himself—Spencer—started a Bible study group in his house, and invited about 20 people to start meeting together. And I was invited to be part of it, which completely puzzled me.

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46