DOVE

An evangelist recounts the arc of his life in this debut memoir.

Greer, the Chicago-based founder of an evangelical ministry organization, opens his remembrance by looking back on his childhood in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the city’s various vibrant neighborhoods “might as well have been foreign countries to those that didn’t live in them”; he tells of playing basketball from before the sun came up to after the sun went down. He lays out his family history, in brief, as a backdrop to these early memories. Some of these stories, particularly those focusing on his larger-than-life Granddad Randolph, make for gripping reading; some touch on the lingering injustices of the Jim Crow South, where his family is from. When Greer, who’s Black, reflects on the fact that his father owned guns, he sees them in context as “insurance in case one of those pitch-black Mississippi nights suddenly lit up like high noon when the Ku Klux Klan left one of their flaming calling card crosses on the family’s front lawn.” The author also remembers how important playing Little League was to him, his disillusionment playing organized team basketball with boys who cared more about getting high than playing the game, and his experiences attending a Catholic prep school. The narrative follows the teenage Greer as he descends into alcohol and drug use, including marijuana, LSD, and cocaine; he lived in a house that prominently displayed posters of Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammed, and Eldridge Cleaver, which gave him the feeling that he was wasting his own potential. He then writes of how his embrace of his fundamentalist church turned his life around.

The book’s religious element provides the strongest narrative thread by exploring and expanding on the theme of Greer’s embracing a tough, hard-won fundamentalist Christian faith. Refreshingly, there’s no note of self-aggrandizement here: “I had no right to pray, no right to ask God for anything at that point in my life,” he writes at one point, “but I asked the Good Lord to cut me some slack just this one time.” The author effectively draws on stories of his marriage, of various church encounters, and of his beloved mother, who is one of the strongest presences in the entire book. The most vivid moments, though, revolve around Greer’s spiritual evolution—specifically, his struggle to find a faith that suited him and then to hold onto it. Over the course of the book, Greer is, by turns, enthusiastic and disheartened about his own ministry, falling in and out of evangelism, and he expresses all of this to readers with an appealing directness and a relatable human touch: “I occasionally envisioned, even dreamed, of standing on stage preaching to thousands of people, but over time those thoughts became so foggy that they started to feel like silly dreams,” he recounts. The result is a vivid collection of personal and spiritual reminiscences.

A highly readable remembrance that tackles issues of race, family, and Christian faith.