Shifting Margins

From Fear and Exclusion Toward Love and Belonging

By: Kenneth Carder

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

“You will find out that the margins are God’s favorite place to hang out.”
Rev. Dr. Cari Willis, Chaplain to those on death row

Through lived stories, Bishop Kenneth Carder candidly shares lessons learned from his experiences with people on the margins of society, including his own formation as the son of Appalachian tenant farmers and textile workers. By entering his life and ministry from poverty to privilege, from provincialism and segregation to beloved community, and from a religion of fear to a theology of liberating love, the reader is invited to widen the margins of their own relationships and perspectives.

The reader accompanies the author as he struggles with economic exploitation and disparity, racial segregation and white privilege, ministry with those in prisons, and the heart-wrenching loss of his wife and his own aging.

• The road map of Carder’s journey includes:
• Birthed and Nurtured on the Margins
• Early Movement from Poverty to Privilege
• A Whole New World and a Radical Shift
• Transition Back Home and a Changed World
• Poverty, Privilege, and Ministry
• Confrontation with Personal and Institutional Racism
• “I Was in Prison. . .”
• Dementia and Diminishment: Gifts from the Forgetting and the Forgotten
• Margins Keep Shifting

What Readers are Saying about Shifting Margins

Bishop Ken Carder is the consummate storyteller. These stories of his life will draw you into the broader narrative where you will not only be with Ken as he is living on the margins of society, but you will find out that the margins are God’s favorite place to hang out as well.

Cari Willis
Chaplain to those on death row

It is a memoir of God’s faithfulness toward a preacher whose integrity, patience, and love for family, the church, and the penitent remind us of the divine grace that abounds in the places, spaces, and faces we encounter and experience daily.

Read, laugh, and cry. Be encouraged. Then go and do likewise.

Robin Dease
Bishop, North Georgia Conference of The United Methodist Church

Carder’s gentle storytelling reflects the heart of a sage. His childhood of poverty, adulthood of privilege and power, and deep reflection about systemic oppression draw the reader into the complexities and beauty of humanity. The stitching together of transformative experiences becomes the literary patchwork quilt of love.
Bishop Connie Mitchell Shelton

Shifting Margins is the story of growing up in the Appalachian hills of East Tennessee. Bishop Carder’s book is a lesson in the lived experience of poverty, marginalization, and powerlessness. Even a naïve person of privilege will be exposed to a significant index of how to begin relationships with the poor and the oppressed by simply walking through these pages. It is also the story of Carder’s pastoral ministry and episcopacy—the challenges, issues, failures he had to confront, and the victories he knew. Do yourself a favor: walk with this poor kid, preacher, pastor, professor, and episcopal leader through the last eighty years. It will inform, and it may transform your life.
Tex Sample

Bishop Ken Carder is a gifted and generous storyteller. Ken tells his story with clarity, sensitivity, vulnerability, and grace. In so doing, he connects us not just to himself but to our humanity and to the God who longs for God’s story to become fully alive in each of us and all of us. I am so glad Megan kept saying, “Pawpaw, tell me a story.”
Bishop Gregory Palmer

Each chapter draws the reader into increased engagement and intimacy with the situations Bishop Carder has faced. Shifting Margins is a must-read for any person interested in spiritual formation.
Pamela Couture, Emmanuel College of Victoria University