Date: March 19, 2025
Very many congratulation to the Rev. Dr. Altagracia Pérez-Bullard, whose book Equipping the Saints to Serve the City: Multicultural Education for Lay Leaders’ Inclusive Ministry (Claremont Press 2025) is now available; you can buy it here. It is an important, powerful, and intensely practical book. The focus is urban ministry (inevitably diverse) and the need to apply Crucial Multicultural Education’s pedagogical theory and practice to the development of lay leaders in urban settings. The case is made for the congregation to engage with diversity and inclusivity thereby creating a sensitivity to the community. It is compelling.
Much of the work underpinning this book was written ten years ago. And it is gift that the book appears in 2025 rather than 2015. In the aftermath of the shocks of 2016 and 2024 and the unrelenting attack on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” Altagracia has written a very timely book. In this book, the challenge of multicultural education is taken seriously – it is not easy work. And yet the imperative of such work is essential for the very survival of the urban church. We are being invited into a frame where honoring diversity, living with diversity, and realizing the potential of diversity are clearly affirmed. It is a challenge to the discourse of our moment. It is making a case that we need to hear and lift up.
I am grateful for this book. I commend it to all those who are seeking to create the Church that God always intended and the Church that is essential to realize if there is going to be a future for the Church.
The Very Rev. Ian S. Markham, Ph.D.
Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary and the President of The General Theological Seminary