Too Precious to Lose

About Too Precious to Lose

A moving and inspiring memoir from a former Obama White House staffer, about his rural Maryland family’s untold history, the merger of three churches—two white, one Black—that changed the trajectory of their lives, and how a radical embrace of community became their salvation—and his.

Jason Green was raised on fellowship—literally. Fellowship Lane, the once unpaved road he grew up on served as a spiritual metaphor throughout his coming of age. A precocious preacher’s kid, the ministry called out to Green, but ultimately he devoted himself to serving the people in a different way—through public service. After working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, he spent four and a half years working in the White House as special assistant to Barack Obama. 


However, Green’s governmental path was cut short by a devastating call that his ninety-five-year-old grandmother was on her deathbed. At her side, he listened intently while she told him her every memory dating back to her birth in Quince Orchard, a town that no longer exists. He was preoccupied with disbelief; how could he have never known the true legacy of his tiny community? How could a whole town’s existence be erased but for the memory of a few surviving elders? Green’s historical research uncovered a surprising trove of tales about the self-determined mission of his newly freed ancestors to build an African American house of worship; and how generations later, on the eve of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assasination, that church’s progeny would be at the center of a brave and fortelling decision to create an integrated church. Quince Orchard’s lost story is part of what Green calls the texture in the American fabric: the moral leadership of the Black church, the longstanding resilience of the Black community and the transformative love of the Black family.

A heart-stirring blend of memoir, history, and social justice, Too Precious to Lose traces one family through a century of life in a single community and all that was gained and lost along the way. Fueled by a new understanding of where he comes from, Green takes readers on a deeply personal journey asking his own questions about belonging all the while finding answers from the compassionate, communal-led lives of his forbearers. Too Precious to Lose is a modern return to a small-town’s past; a reclamation of a collective sense of hope and humanity in a much divided world.