Editor’s Note: The following is the first of a three-part interview. Parts 2 and 3 will appear on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week. 

Brenda Salter McNeil offers readers a plan of action in her new book, “Empowered to Repair: Becoming People Who Mend Broken Systems and Heal Our Communities.” Against the backdrop of the biblical narrative of Nehemiah, she builds her case for reparations and reconciliation. Recently, I was afforded the opportunity to meet with Brenda via Zoom and ask her a few questions about her latest offering to the church.

Starlette Thomas:
“Empowered to Repair” is your latest book. Why was it important for you to write it?

Brenda Salter McNeil:
I work with young adults both at my church and on the college campus where I teach. And I have two young adult children. I am watching a generation coming behind us that is losing confidence in what we call reconciliation, and particularly from a Christian perspective. For them, they feel as if this has become really more relational, that it’s really more about making friends or having a diverse church or multiethnicity or cultural diversity. And they’re wondering when we are ever going to deal with justice. 

And so, I wrote this book because I believe that we have kind of watered-down reconciliation and I do believe that they have a legitimate complaint: that Christians tend to approach this through an individualistic relational lens. And I wanted to try to repair that because scripture says we are called to be the repairers of the breach, restorers of streets to dwell in. So, reparations and reconciliation are two sides of the same coin and I was trying to bring those together in this book.

ST:
You use the biblical narrative of Nehemiah to frame the book. Why should his restorative model be useful to the next generation of repairers and rebuilders of community? 

BSM:
I was looking for something with practical principles and that’s very much who I am. I don’t want to just talk theologically about something. I really want to say this is biblically rooted and this is what it could look like.

So, as I searched through scripture, right? So, in the last book, I wrote about becoming brave. That was rooted in the book of Esther. Because I’m looking for a character who’s had to struggle with the same stuff we got to struggle with, right?

So, Nehemiah is a person whose heart is broken about what’s broken around him. And now he’s got to figure out how do I use the influence that I have to get proximate to the problem and help do something to repair what’s broken.

So, I wanted to take this idea of reparations away from this thought that it’s just about getting a check from somebody who owes us something. That reparations, at the core, is a call to repair and that gave me a narrative to try to look at the principles that repair requires of us.

ST:
Called to the ministry of reconciliation and yet the North American church remains largely segregated, why are Christians so bad at reconciling their differences? 

BSM:
That’s a fifty-thousand-dollar question, is it not? You know, here’s what I think. I’ve been doing this for a very, very, very long time and I’ve given my heart to it. So, I’m a very sincere person. I’m not doing this for notoriety. I feel called of God to do this and I give it everything I’ve got. And I’ve done it for decades now. 

What I’ve noticed is that Christians come to faith through the lens of individualism. “Jesus Christ is my personal savior.” “Jesus came into my heart.” “I’m not racist.” “I have friends who are from different backgrounds,” right?

So, we don’t think systemically. We don’t approach the issue systemically. 

So, I think we’ve had this huge gap between the problems that we face that are rooted in systems that are harming people’s lives and our individualistic worldview that keeps us continually stuck. Because we keep saying, “I did not do that.”

So, part of what has to happen is for us to reexamine our discipleship and how we need to understand that we are the people of God who represent the kingdom of God. No one person does that alone. We do that as a community together. 

And I’m hoping that we’ll start to reexamine how we think about our faith and think about it more like the children of Israel, a collective, the people of God. And not just how I have a personal relationship with God myself.