The significant role of the Churches in Sudan in pressing for peace in the country's two civil wars is well known to students of Sudan but less well known to ecclesiastical historians more broadly. Stein Erik Horjen seeks in this book to tell this story to a broader audience. He points to the role of the All Africa Council of Churches and especially the Liberian Episcopal priest Burgess Carr in negotiating the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement in 1972 that ended Sudan's first civil war. But the bulk of the book is a consideration of the role of church organisations in pressing to end the second civil war, with a particular focus on their role in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Here, the book straddles the line between memoir and history. As a special advisor on peace and reconciliation at Norwegian Church Aid and then later as a Norwegian diplomant, Horjen attended many of the significant meetings in this period. He describes at length the innovative ‘People-to-People’ meetings sponsored by the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC) which brought together people from warring factions at the grassroots level of society to negotiate reconciliation. He documents the on-again, off-again relationship between church leaders and leaders of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army, and how support from the SPLA was critical in getting significant meetings to happen. The footnotes are not always rigorous and so the reader is often left to take on trust Horjen's writing but the book is a good effort to document a period of church history which has largely been overlooked.

It is also very clearly an institutional history. The central actors in the narrative are organisations like the NSCC and the SPLA. What is missing is any detailed sense of the individuals running these organisations. While names like Haruun Ruun and Telar Deng are repeatedly mentioned, the reader is left with little sense of the motivations or self-understanding of these leaders. What theological or biblical rationales, if any, were giving impetus to their work? As an institutional history, it is also an elite history. The massive transformation of the Church that the war brought about, particularly among the Nilotic peoples, is mentioned but there is little discussion of what the Church's work for peace meant at this local level. As southern Sudan again finds itself in the midst of a protracted period of violence, the lessons in this book might be most useful to South Sudanese themselves.