In 2017 I was just getting started editing a book manuscript for a friend, a follow-up to his previous book, which I had also worked on. The topic was interesting and the collaboration was going well. Then he died, suddenly and unexpectedly.

Eventually, the family came to me and asked if I had enough material to finish the project. In addition to the draft materials I already, had, the family facilitated access to Bob’s journals and to his partners in the work he had been writing about, so I was able to finish the book, though Pastors, Chiefs, and Warlords: The Ministry of Being With inevitably turned out differently than it would have had he not died.

Pastors, Chiefs, and Warlords is a conversation-shifting exploration of the way the church understand the role of missionaries and mission work, written as a series of reflections during a journey of more than a thousand kilometers by bicycle and riverboat into a remote region of eastern DR Congo, all in order to visit Rev. Jackie Mwayuma, who was appointed to serve a community that had been ravaged by the recent war. As readers are pulled deeper into this epic voyage, they are invited to wrestle with increasingly challenging questions about evangelism and the mission of the church, especially issues of neocolonialism, savior complexes, racism, justice, war, and the global economy.”

-book jacket

You can find this book at Wipf & Stock’s website or at Bookshop.org.

This book can be read alone, but it can also be read alongside Bob Walters’s earlier book The Last Missionary and Taylor Walters Denyer’s book Decolonizing Mission Partnerships: Evolving Collaboration between the United Methodists of North Katanga and the United States of America.