I’ve just begun a new book called “A Story of Rhythm and Grace: What the Church Can Learn from Rock & Roll about Healing the Racial Divide.” I’m through the prologue and the first chapter and, so far, it’s grabbed me. I plan to blog about it as I read it.

The book’s author, Jimi Calhoun, writes of his desire to “open a discussion within the community of faith, and our our nation as a whole, about how we will address injustice related to racial issues in a postmodern and post-civil rights era.”

Calhoun’s book is a memoir of sorts. He is a rock and roll musician who played with Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams Jr., John Lennon, Mick Jagger, The Four Tops and more. He is an ordained pastor in the International Church of the Foursqure Gospel, an evangelical Pentecostal Christian denomination.

Having had a foot in the worlds of popular culture and the church, he writes from that perspective, defining them as “cities,” noting that in many ways, pop culture has led us toward addressing social injustices based on race and that “my skin color seems to have caused more disquiet within the evangelical community than in the world of popular culture.”

The book was released Feb. 9; it’s been sitting on my desk for awhile, and I’ve finally gotten to it.

Jimi Calhoun

Here’s one key moment of the book so far, for me: In the first chapter, Calhoun recalls playing in a multiracial rock band in early 1967 at a gig at a club in downtown Anchorage, Alaska. “I watched as two or three white men viciously beat a Native Alaskan, and once they they had finished pummeling him, they calmly escorted him out of the club.”

What he assumed was a bar brawl was, in fact, his first exposure to racism. The Native Alaskan had ventured into the wrong side of the nightclub, the side reserved for whites. He and the band played their set, observed the violence and did nothing about it. Later in the chapter, Calhoun writes, “most people do not realize that to passively accept discrimination toward anyone actually increases it for everyone.”

It will be interesting to read to see if he elaborates on that point.