As colleagues in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Rick Richardson and Brenda Salter McNeil gained some hard-won insights about multi-ethnic partnership, one of the most dramatic yet elusive signs of the Kingdom in our racialized culture. But what they gained most of all was a rich friendship. As soon as they sit down for an interview at Wheaton College, where Rick directs the M.A. program in evangelism and leadership, laughter spills out of the room and down the hallway, and they spend much of the next two hours completing each other's sentences.

Indeed, the best way to describe what both Rick and Brenda bring wherever they go (in Brenda's case, all over North America as a speaker and consultant to churches) is good news. In their 2004 book The Heart of Racial Justice, and in Brenda's latest book A Credible Witness, they have applied their evangelists' attention to a tough topic—racial reconciliation—and discovered the gospel is at its ...