Shifting Margins
by Kenneth Carder
From Fear and Exclusion Toward Love and Belonging
Through lived stories, Bishop Kenneth Carder candidly shares lessons learned from his experiences with people on the margins of society, including his own formation as the son of Appalachian tenant farmers and textile workers. By entering his life and ministry from poverty to privilege, from provincialism and segregation to beloved community, and from a religion of fear to a theology of liberating love, the reader is invited to widen the margins of their own relationships and perspectives.
The reader accompanies the author as he struggles with economic exploitation and disparity, racial segregation and white privilege, ministry with those in prisons, and the heart-wrenching loss of his wife and his own aging.
The road map of Carder’s journey includes:
- Birthed and Nurtured on the Margins
- Early Movement from Poverty to Privilege
- A Whole New World and a Radical Shift
- Transition Back Home and a Changed World
- Poverty, Privilege, and Ministry
- Confrontation with Personal and Institutional Racism
- “I Was in Prison. . .”
- Dementia and Diminishment: Gifts from the Forgetting and the Forgotten
- Margins Keep Shifting
What Readers are Saying about Shifting Margins:
A story of growing up in the Appalachian hills of East Tennessee, Shifting Margins is a lesson in the lived experience of poverty, marginalization, and powerlessness. Even a naïve person of privilege will be exposed to a significant index of how to begin relationships with the poor and the oppressed by simply walking through these pages. It is also the story of Carder’s pastoral ministry and his episcopacy— the challenges, issues, failures he had to confront, and the victories he knew. Do yourself a favor: walk with this poor kid, preacher, pastor, professor, and episcopal leader through the last eighty years. It will inform, and it may transform, your life.
Tex Sample, Saint Paul School of Theology
In Shifting Margins, Bishop Kenneth Carder shares very personal and intimate experiences as pastor and bishop. In an era filled with racial strife, these experiences helped him realize his own privilege and the injustice that prejudices leave in their wake.
It is a memoir of God’s faithfulness toward a preacher whose integrity, patience, and love for family, the church, and the penitent remind us of the divine grace that abounds in the places, spaces, and faces we encounter and experience every day.
Read, laugh, and cry. Be encouraged. Then go and do likewise.
Bishop Robin Dease, North Georgia Conference of The U.M. Church
Bishop Ken Carder is the consummate storyteller. These stories of his life will draw you into the broader narrative where you will not only be with Ken as he is living on the margins of society, but you will find out that the margins are God’s favorite place to hang out. One of Bishop Carder’s most formative relationships was with someone on “death row” named Bill, who brought new life to him as a pastoral caregiver. As he writes, “Not only was Jesus, our brother, portrayed in the image on the chalkboard, but he also showed up in the one who sat across the table from us.” Ken met the risen Christ when he met his friend Bill who resided on the row.
May you live into his stories and allow them to shape a new path for you as they paved a new way of being in the world for me.
Rev. Dr. Cari Willis, Chaplain to those on death row
Ken Carder’s gentle storytelling reflects the heart of a sage. His childhood of poverty, adulthood of privilege and power, and deep reflection on systemic oppression draw the reader into the complexities and beauty of humanity. The stitching together of transformative experiences becomes the literary patchwork quilt of love. Wrapping the reader in hope and centering people on the margins, Carder appropriates a lifetime of storied wisdom as a gift to be opened.
Bishop Connie Mitchell Shelton, North Carolina Conference of The U.M. Church