Just as a seed is released into the soil, takes root, transforms underground, and bears fruit, racial healing is a deeply spiritual journey that mirrors the growth of creation.

Sowing Shalom invites readers into a transformative journey of racial healing as spiritual formation, guided by the seasonal rhythms of letting go, nourishing, growing, and yielding. Through Scripture and contemplative practice, spiritual director and pastor Afrika Afeni Mills calls readers into vulnerability, humility, repair, and joy, and offers a pathway to cultivate the inner and communal conditions for beloved community.

This book invites all people into the healing journey, regardless of how they have been racialized. While fully honoring the disproportionate wounds carried by people of color through generations, it recognizes that racialization has wounded the entire human family—and wholeness requires a path forward for all of us, together.

What you'll find in Sowing Shalom:



- Spiritual practices like lectio divina, the examen, centering prayer, and imaginative prayer that help readers move beyond analysis into deeper transformation, compassion, courage, and hope

- Racial healing not merely as intellectual work or social analysis but as a spiritual journey that involves surrender, lament, confession, healing, reconnection, and growth

- Encouragement to honor the slow, often-hidden process of transformation that mirrors the slow growth of the natural world

- Invitation to engage your own stories, grief, wounds, assumptions, and formation while learning how to move toward healing across racial difference and within community

Sowing Shalom equips readers to engage the work of justice not just outwardly but as sacred work within the soul. Ideal for personal reading, contemplative retreats, and spiritual directors, this book is for anyone who longs for justice and healing, laments what has been lost, and believes that beloved community is still possible.



Afrika Afeni Mills is an elder and assistant pastor at Grace Communion Steele Creek in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she guides discipleship and nurtures spiritual formation. As a spiritual director, she accompanies others in noticing God's presence and guidance. She is an adjunct instructor at the Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development and the author of Open Windows, Open Minds. A Brooklyn-born lover of books, hip hop, and R&B, she lives in Charlotte with her husband and their two adult children.



Table of contents forthcoming