Two steps forward, one step back.  Three steps forward, two steps back.  That’s how progress towards racial justice and healing in America can seem.  So what does a follower of Jesus who longs for the Kingdom of God to come and for the Beloved Community to become real do when the resistance and setbacks are real?  Keep on stepping forward!  That’s one reason why we’re reenergizing the Repentance Project.  As it was in the beginning, our mission still is “to encourage racial healing by communicating the systemic legacies of slavery, building relationships, and creating opportunities—through formation, repentance, and repair—for a just future.”

The Repentance Project was born of the Holy Spirit of God in September 2015.  I don’t say that about many things with such clarity and conviction, but this origin story helps illustrate the point.  Between 2015 and 2018 the Repentance Project developed “An American Lent” and “An American Lament” (both of them referred to as AAL), a spiritual formation journey over 50 days to help Christians connect the dots between slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary realities.  The point of this journey was never to make people feel bad or guilty, but rather that, recognizing the actual history of America and race, that we would be grieved, moved to repentance, and commit to actions of repair with God’s help.  From the beginning we’ve been clear about 4 R’s that we are about—Recognize, Repent, and Repair, in the context of Relationships.  Since the development of these tools, thousands of people have gone through AAL, inspiring deep change for many people and leading to many efforts, small and large, by Christians to make America a place where the Beloved Community might move from a beautiful vision to an actual, lived, experienced reality.

Attention to our work exploded in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a tragic and unnecessary event which led to the largest efforts towards racial justice across America since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Then we partnered with David Bailey and Arrabon for broader distribution of AAL, and brought on Kristy Wallace Grant as the Director for the Repentance Project for a couple of years, and she did a great job convening conversations, offering book and movie discussions, hosting conversations, leading pilgrimages, and keeping our attention fixed on the need and invitation to keep moving towards a place, led by the church, where God’s vision for a reconciled society can come more fully into being.   Kristy has since become Coracle’s Ministry Center Coordinator in Arlington, and now NaTasha Brown, Coracle’s Program Manager, is providing leadership for the Repentance Project along with all of our Coracle staff.

After a summer of transition, we’re excited to renew the critical work of the Repentance Project in a fresh way, communicating with a monthly newsletter with devotional reflections about race, America, Jesus, and the church, information about upcoming events that we’re offering or pointing you towards trusted partners, providing excellent resources and references for those who want to make a difference in America’s race relations in the Spirit of Christ, and gathering people together for conversation, action, and enjoying the beauty of the fellowship of the Kingdom of God, a hallmark of which is diversity.   We’re delighted to be deepening in partnership with the Racial Reconciliation Group, which was birthed in northern Virginia by a few folks who had journeyed through An American Lent together.

All that to say, friends, you haven’t heard from the Repentance Project for a couple of months…get ready to hear a lot more and more regularly!  More importantly, together let’s allow ourselves to be formed by Jesus who led the way and makes possible reconciliation between God and people and between peoples.  The need for a better future for all America as it relates to our racial history, realities, and abiding tensions hasn’t changed since 2020.  In fact the need has increased as gains since 2020 towards racial equity and peaceable communities in America have encountered resistance.  In spite of backlash, pushback, and setbacks, let’s keep on moving forward together towards a just future, one step at a time, as many as it takes!