Encounter God in the City
Randy White, InterVarsity Press, 2006
Paper back, 220 pages, $15.00
Randy White is on staff with InterVarsity as the national coordinator of Urban Projects. He and his wife, Tina, and their three children live in Fresno, California. Encounter God in the City is Randy’s second book.
This is a series of stories about what I and my family experienced when we relocated to a high-crime, high poverty neighborhood, how the move became a catalyst for amazing growth in our lives, and how that transformation in us became an onramp to transformation in the neighborhood.
How did you conceive of this book and what motivated you to write it?
It dawned on us that the transformation we were seeing in our own lives and in our neighborhood was something the whole body of Christ could experience and contribute to. We wanted to create entry points for that to happen. Plus, many churches and universities send volunteer teams to inner-city projects, and some of them actually can become a detriment to the neighborhood if not done well; we wanted to help prepare teams to have a long-term, transformational affect.
Tell us about your personal history and how events in your life may have influenced your book’s thesis.
Thirteen years ago my family made a move to the Lowell Neighborhood in Fresno, California, in order to minister there and connect students to the work of God. God turned our lives upside down as a result of that move. The story of that move is told in my first book, Journey to the Center of the City. This current book is based on the concrete lessons learned since that first book. It is about the amazing, transforming power of the experience of working within God’s arena in the city.
What do you hope your readers will learn and do as a result of reading your book?
The Spirit of God is doing something amazing in cities across the country as they explode in population and diversity. If the readers will link their lives to what God is doing, he will transform them, their families, and the most difficult neighborhoods they can imagine. I know that God is raising up a new generation of average people wanting to be part of the story of God in the city.
