In 1688 Mennonites made one of the first recorded arguments against slavery in North America. Mennonites rarely owned slaves, but in the years following 1688 further statements against slavery were also rare. During the civil rights era a group of Mennonite people of color called the larger church to recognize as a religious minority that they should be in solidarity with racial minorities. One of the central figures in this story was John Powell–now a member of Shalom Community Church–who encouraged White Mennonites to give 500,000 dollars a year to a Compassion Fund “for the purpose of developing and expanding ways of serving the urban poor and minorities in new and more meaningful ways.” John made this call at the national Mennonite Church assembly in 1969 in Turner, Oregon, and delegates agreed to “respond with a minimum of $6 per member per year”. The church did not keep this promise. Only $160,000 was raised. For more on this story read this article.

In 2020, a group from Shalom Community Church read Jennifer Harvey’s Dear White Christians. Harvey suggests that racial reconciliation has failed, “If, 50 years after Martin Luther King’s assassination we are still struggling to realize reconciliation, might it be possible that what Black Christians were saying then (and have continued to say ever since) is something that white Christians still need to hear today?”

The answer, and this is meant as an answer for white people, is a reparative framework. White people need to find a way to both learn about the history of Black oppression and white privilege and understand how these have been constructed around the concept of race. Then we need to understand the particular and local oppressions and disadvantages that people of color have endured, and find ways to reconstruct interracial relationships through addressing these histories and structures.

Two things stood out  most decisively through the process of reading this book: one was need to work at racial justice in ways that whites don’t control and the second was the ways that institutional actions have served to delay and control attempts at racial justice. We long for a way that we can lead with action, not needing to get all of our words right.

Thus we committed, as a congregation, to a reparative act, which isn’t an apology, or anything other than a beginning, after so many other beginnings. We proposed that John Powell select a group of people to spend it, who aren’t a part of the giving community. And we propose inviting anyone who wants to to join us. Our goal will be to do something, but to do it by giving up control.

We talked at length about how to be involved in reparative work as white people, and understand that it is a complex work that involves learning about the history of the racially privileged and oppressed–especially in the particular ways these are present in our particular lives, and then working against these particular moments of racism and racial constructions. We discussed the nature of reparative acts and whether small things count or what kind of larger efforts might need to be engaged.

We also talked about how white people have a tendency to want actions to be perfect, and about how our talking about things can become the enemy of actually engaging the work we say we want to do.

We know that the logistics of raising and spending money are important to people but for this act encourage people not to worry about logistics and to focus on making the action happen. We have learned about the historical inability of institutions to carry out reparative acts and so don’t plan to seek the endorsement of our conferences or denominations. We simply plan to collect money and then pass it on.