How a congregation came to pay reparations

What comes after the book studies? For decades, members at Assembly Mennonite Church in Goshen, Ind., did what congregations do to be informed participants in God’s liberating justice. We heard sermons, clarified our values, became politically engaged and read a lot of books. Good, essential books. But after the summer of 2020, after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, we did something new. We formed an Anti-Racism Accountability Group for White people who recognize their tendency to engage antiracism work for a while and then get distracted. We met monthly to share what we did last month and what we intended to do next month. It provided not only accountability but encouragement. Out of those monthly meetings came the idea to take seriously the centuries-old call for reparations. Reparation of this sort is perhaps best understood as “the deliberate repair of a multigenerational campaign of cultural theft — theft of wealth, theft of truth and theft of power” (see Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair by Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson — one of those essential books). Black Americans have been calling for these reparations for a long time. In 1865, with the end of the...