In a book that artfully combines theology, history, and sociology, Peter Slade examines the “lived theology” of Mission Mississippi, a Christian organization based in Jackson, Mississippi that promotes racial reconciliation under the slogan “changing Mississippi one relationship at a time.” Slade attempts to discern the theological beliefs that underlie participation in Mission Mississippi and to evaluate this lived theology by placing it alongside the work of academic theologians on friendship and reconciliation. Slade also sets the work of Mission Mississippi in the context of the troubled history of race and religion in this Deep South state, asking whether a movement aimed at fostering racial reconciliation can succeed without addressing issues of social justice.

Slade spends the first half of the book weaving a rich theological and historical context in which to evaluate Mission Mississippi's work, developing the conceptual poles of open friendship and the closed society that drive his analysis. Slade explicates Jürgen Moltmann's theology of “open friendship,” modeled on Christ's sacrifice and his “extension of friendship towards those deemed antisocial” (22), through a narrative style that blends Moltmann's biography with his theology. Slade then narrates the origins of University of Mississippi professor James Silver's famous book about civil rights-era Mississippi, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964), finding Silver's descriptions of his Mississippi eerily resonant with Moltmann's description of the “closed and introverted society” (20).

Having set the stage, Slade turns to the rather unlikely mix of personalities, churches, and organizations that collided to form Mission Mississippi in Jackson in the 1990s. Slade traces the organization's beginnings to prayer breakfasts attended by Christian businessmen in Jackson and to a series of informal meetings between white and black clergy hosted by the theologically conservative First Presbyterian Church of Jackson. He then follows the arc of Mission Mississippi's development as it moved from sponsoring large stadium-type revivals featuring black and white evangelists in the 1990s to its present focus on church partnerships and biweekly prayer breakfasts held alternately at white and black cultural spaces, from all-white prep schools on the outskirts of town to black Baptist churches in drug-ridden neighborhoods.

Mission Mississippi is avowedly apolitical, focussed intently on fostering interpersonal racial reconciliation. The organization demurs from engaging any of the issues of social justice that quickly surface in any interaction between whites and blacks in the state with America's poorest African American population. Much of Slade's book reads as a response to the work of sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, whose Divided by Faith (2000) criticized the individualistic and relational approach of Mission Mississippi as ineffective and even inhibitive to the progress of social justice. In response, Slade probes the relationship between reconciliation and justice, evaluating Mission Mississippi practices alongside Miroslav Volf's theology of reconciliation to argue that Mission Mississippi's prayer meetings represent a vital forum where, through listening to and praying for one another, participants practice open friendship and develop the ability to see through the other's eyes, an essential first step on the road to reconciliation and justice.

Mission Mississippi, as its African American director Dolphus Weary says, is “Reconciliation 101.” Slade recognizes as much, and argues that the organization represents a pragmatic and theologically sound, if incipient, approach to the intractable problems of racial reconciliation and social justice in Mississippi. He nevertheless expresses at the end of the book the hope that Mission Mississippi will eventually “relax its dogmatic insistence on the separation between spiritual and social spheres” (181). In one sense, then, this book is a theological analysis awaiting the final verdict of history. And while Mississippi's history gives little reason for hope in this regard, Slade's perceptive study does.