From Reconciliation to Revolution traces the history of the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM), a summer field education program that ran from 1960 to 1968. Housed and run by students at Union Theological Seminary, SIM participants came from mainline seminaries across the country. Alumni of the program include visionaries in the streets, pulpit, and academy, such as Jane Stembridge, James Forbes, and Ralph Luker. Having emerged from the same student conference as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SIM sought to transform how Protestant churches addressed racial injustice. Cline highlights the significance of SIM's work to the larger civil rights movement.

The book's title attests to the theological and political shift in the Student Interracial Ministry's mission through the decade. At first, SIM students brought to summer positions a theological commitment to reconciliation. White seminarians placed in black churches and black seminarians placed in white churches hoped to engender “community and understanding between the races,” and eventually reconciliation of white and black Americans to each other and to God and Jesus Christ (200). Cline shows how SIM participants, engaging closely in the work of congregations throughout the South, undertook a “radical rethinking of the concepts of worship, congregation, and community” (89). Seminarians were asking whether the church, as part of the establishment, could be a driver of social and spiritual change.

By the middle of the decade, SIM had shifted focus from interpersonal reconciliation to social and economic revolution, and SIM began to engage in urban ministry, emphasizing community-based congregational organizing. Convicted by the clarion call of Black Power, seminarians were developing a “greater understanding of the forces—among them economic and political power—that determine how a society functions and whether or not it will change” (143). Church, SIM participants came to see, was not the structures of buildings or even scripture; rather, church was the experience of fellowship among the community of all believers.

Cline listens closely to SIM participants' religious and political reasons. Drawing from archival sources, interviews, and meeting minutes, Cline's skillful theological analysis illuminates how seminarians were making sense of their engagement in the church at a time of great political and religious change. Cline's writing is at once moving and clear-eyed, recognizing the depth of religious commitments and framing them within a larger historical context.

Ostensibly a history of a small, student-run summer field education project, From Reconciliation to Revolution is also compelling history of midcentury liberal American Christianity. The book is an astute meditation of the capacity of theological education to address social change, depicting how SIM students pushed to discover whether American churches could live out the Christian Gospel. Cline's book is a must-read for those of us who teach at American seminaries, as we now confront a changing religious landscape and endeavor to meet our students' needs in our own times of crisis. Many of us will identify with Cline's description of the challenges faced by seminaries in the 1960s: “There was not one but a series of crises—pedagogical, theological, spiritual, financial, and organizational” (164).

I appreciate Cline's detailed focus of the Student Interracial Ministry's eight years, yet I was wishing the book had also addressed antecedents to SIM activism. For instance, did students in the 1960s, especially those who were also enrolled at Union, consider George Houser's activism an inspiration or resource? In the 1940s, Houser was a Union student, a co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, and among the Union Eight, a group of seminarians arrested for refusing to register for the draft. Houser innovated direct action techniques and was engaged in interracial organizing two decades before SIM, but Cline's history does not engage whether and how Union students in the 1960s knew about earlier efforts. Whether SIM students did or did not, what bearing does this have on an evaluation of student activism and whether and how it knows and learns from its own history?

From Reconciliation to Revolution lifts up importantly activists and community workers who were the lifeblood of the larger movement, such as Charles Sherrod. An organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a Union seminarian, Sherrod worked in Albany, Georgia, with the goal of desegregating the entire community. What became known as the “Albany movement” is a cardinal point in one version of the history of the civil rights movement. On this telling, the attempt to transform a community was met by an entrenched, white supremacist power structure that was willing and able to imprison more than one thousand African Americans in Albany and the surrounding towns. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. arrived in late 1961 with the hopes that bringing national attention would crack white resistance, but eight months later King left Albany in defeat and community efforts foundered.

Cline's history shows, however, that the Albany movement continued and strengthened after King left, as it turned into the Southwest Georgia Project. Modeling how civil rights historiography needs to look also in places where King was not, Cline underscores the persistent work that social transformation requires. Indeed, this work is ongoing today. I would have loved to read an epilogue in which Cline reflected on the legacies of SIM, including Charles Sherrod and Shirley Sherrod's work to create land trusts, an outgrowth of the still vibrant Southwest Georgia Project. This is less a criticism that an affirmation that the history in From Reconciliation to Revolution is not past but continues to have moral and political significance in communities today.