BOOK OF THE MONTH: No Neutral Ground

OCTOBER BOOK OF THE MONTH

REVIEWER: Ali Hull

BOOK: No Neutral Ground: Finding Jesus in a Cape Town Ghetto
Author: Pete Portal
(Hodder & Stoughton 2020) 288pp, paperback, RRP £10.99

In 2009, Londoner Pete Portal moved to Cape Town, to start working with and living alongside drug dealers and violent criminals. A thriving and beautiful city, Cape Town also has one of the highest crime rates in the world, and much of that crime is committed in Manenberg, the area to which Pete moved. Only by living there, he believes, can he and those with him truly reach their neighbours, and the book has quite a lot of reflections on what Christianity should look like, as well as what it often looks like. He also explores what the gangs offer to the lads who join them, and the crisis of parenting that means few boys grow up with a strong father figure, and, in turn, few are able to offer to their own children what they have never experienced themselves.   

The book is well-written and exciting, but Portal makes no attempt to hide his failures, his mistakes, his inner turmoil when the young men he has loved and discipled disappear back to the streets and the drugs. One particular story contrasts his experience of taking some of them away for a weekend, inspired by what happened when Jackie Pullinger did the same in her book, Chasing the Dragon. The personal cost is never under-estimated – but he also writes frequently of the joys, the highs, and the amount he learns from, and is changed by, those around him. He writes about living on the knife edge between success and failure, while also challenging the way that society, and even the church, often measure success. He is adamant that hit and run evangelism does not work and is not biblical; arguing instead for incarnational ministry, where people stick around. 

Nor does he suggest that every Christian should be living in a ghetto. His argument is that we need to know where God has put us, and to be obedient to that call, and many of the principles he explores apply regardless of where we are called to be. This is an excellent book, highly recommended.  

Reviewer: Ali Hull
Ali Hull is the Book Editor for Preach magazine.