Chris Rice
11 min read ⭑
“Renewal is where strange and difficult ground is transformed into holy ground. Most renewal movements in the history of the church were birthed in times of crisis. God is doing something new, and we don’t want to miss it.”
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?
For me, the best meals are like a liturgy, and few do it like the Japanese. I remember sitting next to my friend Pastor Katsuki Hirano in one of those Tokyo restaurants where you come off a busy street and walk into another world. Across the bar, our chef was the celebrant, using chopsticks to lightly fry vegetables and seafood “tempura” style right in front of our eyes, engaging us in chit-chat and passing fresh items as we sipped our Japanese draft beer (there’s nothing like it).
“More noise when you eat is okay,” exhorted Katsuki. “It means you enjoy it.”
In a way, this meal represented something special because here’s the thing. I was born in the USA but grew up in the unlikely homeland of Seoul, South Korea, where, as a son of Presbyterian mission workers, I heard many stories about the decades of colonial pain that Japan inflicted on the Koreans before World War II. Well into my 40s, I hated Japan and avoided all things Japanese. But eventually, due to a new reconciliation initiative I was exploring in Northeast Asia, I couldn’t avoid going there.
It was Katsuki who met me at the airport. Over the next five days, he interrupted my “single story” about Japan with his hospitality, humor, wisdom and apologies for the past. That helped ignite a 10-year initiative of justice and reconciliation across the region that many others joined.
Every meal with Katsuki was like a sacrament of reconciliation. I never imagined a day I’d feel as much at home in Tokyo as in Seoul.
Chris Turgeon; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activities do you love and help you find spiritual renewal?
I work with an international NGO close to many places of conflict and engage the United Nations, so as a result, new places of pain keep disturbing my heart. My next career move may be a greeter at Disneyland, the alleged “happiest place on earth.” In the meantime, I regularly escape to New York City’s treasure of parks and gardens that take my breath away.
A spiritual director once advised that, as a perfectionist, I should stay close to nature. Around that same time, my wife, Donna, converted me to a bird watcher, and I haven’t looked back since. Northward from the city, I get up to the Adirondack Mountains as often as I can to smell the pine trees, feel the grass between my toes and plunge into the water. As I canoe, I look for loons, those magical, majestic water birds that let you get close, then dive and emerge a minute later 30 yards away.
The last time I was up there, I got out of my favorite swimming spot, took a bite of the world’s best Rueben sandwich (Lakeview Deli in Saranac Lake), and lifted my eyes. And lo and behold, there was a loon, drifting right in front of me. It was as if it was sent, seeking me.
Every time I mention my latest loon encounter, my daughter rolls her eyes and says, “Oh, Dad.” But for me, they have become a kind of sign that points to the deepest reality of this world, one that stands strong beneath all the very real pain and trouble.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you hide it?
Part of the journey that inspired my new book, “From Pandemic to Renewal,” occurred in 2020 when I was living with my father in small-town Vermont, protecting him from the virus.
As the United Nations shut down and I was detached from work routines that gave me purpose and energy, the closet of my heart opened and things began creeping out. Donna and I had recently spent five years working in both South and North Korea, and those years were hard on our three children back in North Carolina.
During that time in Vermont in 2020, I came to the painful realization that it was easier for me to face the challenges in North Korea than in North Carolina. After all, my work gave recognition and public validation. My private world didn’t offer that reward.
That realization inspired my book and continues to inspire me to grow as a peacemaker and seek renewal. In The Transcendent Self, an obscure little book that’s very precious to me, the author says the second half of life is partly about becoming reconciled to what one fell short of and failed to do. I have much to learn to become as faithful a peacemaker in the private world of my family as I’ve tried to be in public places across the world. Thankfully, my children have been forgiving, and Donna would say I’m probably being too hard on myself. But even that tendency is something I long for freedom from as I seek renewal.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your obsession? And why should it be ours?
I just published a new book, “From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis.” I watched the pandemic unfold from my United Nations front-row seat and Donna put her life at risk as a nurse at the frontlines in New York City as brokenness was exposed in my family and my own divided heart. On every front — global, national and personal — I began to see that the pandemic was like an x-ray revealing many new challenges. But my life’s journey has also taught me that crises can ignite incredible new growth in our lives and communities.
Reading my book is like jumping into a helicopter together to look over the landscape of what the pandemic revealed and the incredible opportunities for renewal that lie before each of us now. In the book, I show eight challenges the pandemic exposed or accelerated as well as eight transformational practices for our lives, communities and churches. That includes bearing joy in a world of frantic anxiety, being peacemakers in a world of surging polarization, pursuing private integrity in a world of public validation and renewing the church in a world longing for hope.
The pandemic is the crisis of a century, a before-and-after moment. But it’s also the opportunity of a century. I want to help us see that renewal is where strange and difficult ground is transformed into holy ground. Most renewal movements in the history of the church were birthed in times of crisis. God is doing something new, and we don’t want to miss it.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors, or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I’m what I call a recovering activist. Years ago, I lived as if Psalm 46:10 said, “Be busy and know that I am God.” But that changed when a close friend and ministry partner died suddenly of a heart attack. Before that crisis, I hadn’t done a single prayer retreat in 17 years. But since then, solitude at monasteries and retreat houses has become a routine of mine. In fact, I have a friend who teaches political science at Duke University who likes to say “Chris Rice retreats more than the French army.”
I’ve learned it takes me 24 hours to detox from everything marked “urgent,” “must” and “have to do” in my heart and mind. Retreat is a “not to” rhythm that must (there I go again, “must”) be intentional. I believe retreat slows me down so I can catch up with God. Invariably, I receive an unexpected word from him, a deep insight into a difficult situation, or a profound and unexpected inspiration. In the words of writer Madeleine L’Engle, I have learned to “expect revelation.”
A complementary practice I also regularly engage in is moving my body on strange ground. Looking back, I see how God was able to change me only by relocating me to a different context. I learned about my racism in Mississippi, and while singing in the Gospel choir there, I also learned not to be shy about exuberant joy. I visited Palestine and Israel for the first time this year, and it really shook me up — it’s still speaking to me.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied actions that open our hearts to the presence of God. So spill it. Which spiritual practice is workin’ best for you right now?
When I first heard the term “emotionally healthy spirituality,” I thought I must have had wax in my ears. Say what? I’ve been in churches from multiracial nondenominational to mainline Presbyterian to Mennonite. I have seminary degrees. I’ve been in classes about marriage, money, anti-racism and the book of Revelation. But no pastor, professor or writer who crossed my path had ever used that term.
Then Donna and I moved to New York City and started taking a course called “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” in a church here. It’s revealed a new frontier for me. I’m finding fresh growth in expressing my emotions honestly before God and compassionate companions. I’m learning that when I was growing up, my family didn’t handle conflict well. Actually, we didn’t “do” conflict at all. Emotion was scary.
But as I read Scripture, I’m encountering Jesus in a fresh way, looking for his emotions as I read the gospels — his delight, his anger, his frustration, his grief and above all, his joy. As I seek to name my own emotions in honest prayer, I’m learning that my reactions to situations often say more about me than the person I’m reacting to.
This is tricky ground, though. I’m seeing a lot of loss and grief I wasn’t aware of, so it’s really important to connect to that voice Jesus hears before he begins his ministry: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (see Matthew 3:17). Getting our “belovedness” into our bones allows us to hold nothing back in truthfully talking to God.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Our email subscribers get free ebooks featuring our favorite resources — lots of things that have truly impacted our faith lives. But you know about some really great stuff, too. What are three resources that have impacted you?
1. Years ago, when I was a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, Mississippi pastor-activist John Perkins came to speak there. At the time, I’d never heard of him or his work for racial justice and healing. But a year after hearing his story, I went to volunteer at his ministry in a neighborhood at the margins of Jackson, Mississippi. I went for six months, which turned into 17 years that changed my understanding of Christian life.
Perkins’ book “Let Justice Roll Down” taught me the unusual power of story — not only to move our hearts toward truth but also to give us hope and help us believe that the way things are is not the way they have to be.
2. When I’m holding too tightly to life, I continually return to the poems of Denise Levertov. A couple of my favorites are “Primary Wonder” and “Only Once.”
3. I see the Christian life as a journey and adventure, heading from the known into the unknown, led by faith and courage. The tonality of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books is so true to that.
At a challenging moment, Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.”
“So do I,” answers Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
That just gets life right for me.
We all have things we cling to to survive (or thrive) in tough times. Name one resource you’ve found indispensable in this current season — and tell us what it’s done for you.
I’ll share two, actually:
1. One joy of writing my new book was discovering a slew of fresh, overlooked voices outside the U.S. who speak eloquently to this new and turbulent time we are in. One is Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han and his book “The Burnout Society.” Han says the signature affliction of our age is not pessimism but deep anxiety, exhaustion and “excess positivity” driven by the illusion that “the more active one becomes, the freer one is.” At just 60 pages, his book helped me see powerful forces at work in our world — and right around me every day — to seduce us into captivity to activity. The antidote to that, he says, is Sabbath, a holy day of play and “not to.”
2. I’m a huge soccer fan and time with the “beautiful game” is a joyful distraction. Almost every day now, I listen to the ESPN FC podcast’s pundits and former players, most of whom are from outside the U.S. I feel like I’m on a first-name basis with all of them — Dan, Kay, Shaka, Gab, Craig, Stevie and Alexis. Their insight, laughter, joy and passion are infectious.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
My next frontier leans toward learning and writing about border-crossing problems in our world — from environmental decay to emerging battles between the U.S. and China to global trends of young people more connected to their phones but less to the church. Border-crossing problems touch all of us. And only a border-crossing gospel and border-crossing people can provide border-crossing solutions. The good news is, our Christian DNA is border-crossing.
I’ll soon be traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the first time. I’m going because my colleague there, Dr. Mulanda Jimmy Juma, says the desire for electric cars in both the U.S. and China is helping fuel a superpower battle for precious minerals, resulting in churches in eastern Congo facing more and more local violence. I want to get close to that. We U.S. Christians have a lot to learn from people like Mulanda. I want to find ways for wisdom like his to cross over our borders.
This kind of work requires intense listening. It takes a lot out of me, especially in places of intense pain. But I’m told the Congo is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I need to remind myself that it’s often the people in places of greatest trouble who are the most resilient, who laugh the hardest, who keep celebrating, and who keep hope alive because of their connection to a “beyond” that exceeds their immediate sight. Being with people like that excites me.
Are you honest with God when you talk to him? Or does prayer only feel like a ritual you perform, one that’s lost its luster?
Earlier in our interview, Chris said, “Getting our ‘belovedness’ into our bones allows us to hold nothing back in truthfully talking to God.”
Chris didn’t make up this idea. Jesus said it first: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. … As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love” (John 15:7, 9, NIV).
Where is God inviting you to “remain” in his love today? And how would receiving his love impact your prayers?
Chris Rice (D.Min., Duke University) lives in New York City and is the director of the United Nations Office of Mennonite Central Committee, an international faith-based agency focused on relief, development and peace. He’s the author of From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis and Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Healing, and Peace, and he was a co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. He has helped create initiatives to heal social conflicts and renew Christian life across the U.S., East Africa and Northeast Asia. Read his blog at chrisriceauthor.com.
