Honest, Humble, Hopeful
A Review of
Veracity & Verse: A Preacher’s Reflections & Poems on Faith & Truth
Rev. Dr. James Alexander Forbes Jr.
Hardcover: Broadleaf Books, 2025
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Reviewed by Lynn Domina
Most people invested in contemporary progressive Protestantism have probably at least heard of Reverend James Forbes, and the lucky ones have also heard him preach. (I heard him twice many years ago, once when I was visiting Riverside Church in New York, where he was senior minister, and once when he visited Metropolitan Community Church of New York, where I served as a deacon.) His sermons were energetic and challenging, accessible and poetic, memorable and inspiring. They drew people to him, and more importantly, they drew people to the gospel. Part memoir, part social commentary, part poetry collection, Veracity & Verse: A Preacher’s Reflections & Poems on Faith & Truth explores how this man became so effective.
In many ways, Forbes’s success is astonishing. He was born in 1935 in the tiny town of Burgaw, North Carolina. Though he’d had to drop out of school after sixth grade, Forbes’s father, James Alexander Forbes, Sr., completed high school through a correspondence course and eventually went on to earn a degree from Shaw University, near Raleigh, all while raising eight children with his wife, Mabel. He was a preacher, too, so readers might assume that Forbes, Jr. came by his vocation naturally, but if he did, it took him a while to recognize it. As a young man, he was determined to become a doctor, though he claims his motives were more romantic than altruistic. During his college years, he met Martin Luther King, Jr., and his admiration of King steered him toward ministry.
Forbes’s academic pedigree is impressive: a Bachelor’s degree from Howard University, an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and a D. Min. from Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. This list, however, obscures one shocking fact. Before he enrolled at Union, he’d applied to Duke Divinity School in his home state, but Duke had rejected his application because “We do not accept colored students, nor do we plan to do so in the foreseeable future” (53). I should not have been shocked by this fact—and my ability to be shocked here is surely a sign of my own white privilege—because Forbes has already discussed some of the racism he experienced as a boy, his questioning of racial categories, and the first time he was permitted to sit down at a Woolworth’s counter to eat a hot dog. The boundary between history and current events is always debatable, a fact that perhaps contributes to the length of the arc of the moral universe, whether or not it bends toward justice. Still, the fact that an American living in 2025 personally experienced legal segregation reminds us that Brown v. Board of Education and the other civil rights acts that followed weren’t passed all that long ago. Yet Forbes doesn’t describe Duke’s rejection with bitterness or even a snarky aside. His belief in the Beloved Community is so strong and his hope so firm that he’s able to take the long view, stating that he has since preached at Duke and served the university as a Visiting Professor.
Union seems clearly to have been the right choice for him. He describes his experiences there enthusiastically and in more detail than most of the other phases of his life. He clearly thrived in New York, as a student, professor, and eventually as the first African American senior minister of Riverside Church, which he served until his retirement in 2007. He is frank about the personal growth these roles demanded of him as well as about the growth required of his students and congregants. “I served a divided congregation at The Riverside Church,” he says. “My leadership and preaching style was celebrated and rejected at the same time” (136). It’s one thing for liberal white Christians worshipping in a mixed-race congregation to take pride in calling a Black preacher to their pulpit; it’s quite another to adjust their expectations of liturgy,
“In a few months some members discovered, ‘Oh my God…He’s Black!’ There was a difference in style between [William Sloane] Coffin and Forbes. People started responding to the sermons with ‘Amen!’ and ‘Hallelujah!’ Was the music going to change? And why does it take so long for the Spirit to get around to the point? How long will it be before we hit the tilt factor? Turning Riverside into just another Black church in Harlem?” (124-25).
Fortunately, Forbes and the church members managed the transition and worked together for nearly twenty years.
So far, I’ve focused primarily on the Veracity of the title, the autobiographical prose. Much of the book consists of poetry Forbes wrote, as he says, “during the quiet time and in the night” (xv). Stylistically, the poems rely on traditional rhyme and meter and utilize straightforward accessible language. In contrast to sermons written for oral delivery to a specific audience, the poems seem to have been composed primarily as a form of self expression for an individual sorting out his thoughts and experiences; yet, many of them could serve as sermon illustrations. Here are the opening stanzas of a representative poem “A Way Was Made,” which describes a moment in Forbes’s life and also invites the reader to identify with a similar experience:
All through the night my mind was much troubled,
About worries awaiting the break of day.
I tried to think of the path I could take,
To make these heavy burdens drift away.
I could not see how or what held a clue.
No mysterious plan was close at hand.
The Lord must have heard my state of mind,
And whispered, “You will find a safe place to land” (54).
Some sections of the book seem to have been written earlier, for different purposes, and inserted here in appropriately chronological sections. Occasionally, references to the original contexts are a bit distracting; they could have been inserted more seamlessly with slightly more attentive editing. This, however, is a minor flaw in a book that is as honest, humble, and hopeful as this one is.
Lynn Domina
Lynn Domina the author of several books, including three collections of poetry: Inland Sea, Framed in Silence, and Corporal Works. She is also the author of a collection of reflections, Devotions from HERstory: 31 Days with Women of Faith. She teaches English at Northern Michigan University and occasional poetry classes at Bethany Theological Seminary. Read more here: www.lynndomina.com
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