Leadership Journal

As colleagues in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Rick Richardson and Brenda Salter McNeil gained some hard-won insights about multi-ethnic partnership, one of the most dramatic yet elusive signs of the Kingdom in our racialized culture. But what they gained most of all was a rich friendship. As soon as they sit down for an interview at Wheaton College, where Rick directs the M.A. program in evangelism and leadership, laughter spills out of the room and down the hallway, and they spend much of the next two hours completing each other's sentences.

Indeed, the best way to describe what both Rick and Brenda bring wherever they go (in Brenda's case, all over North America as a speaker and consultant to churches) is good news. In their 2004 book The Heart of Racial Justice, and in Brenda's latest book A Credible Witness, they have applied their evangelists' attention to a tough topic—racial reconciliation—and discovered the gospel is at its heart.

As part of the Christian Vision Project's big question for 2008, "Is our gospel too small?" Andy Crouch and Marshall Shelley sat down with Brenda and Rick to ask about the relationship of the gospel to issues of race and justice.

You worked together for many years, but your collaboration took a further step when you wrote The Heart of Racial Justice together. What did you learn from each other in the course of writing that book?

Brenda: Well, I learned a lot about Scripture. Rick was the first person that pointed out to me that Abram was called to leave home in order to fulfill the original cultural mandate in Genesis 1, that people fill the earth. In Genesis 11, at the Tower of Babel, humanity had decided to stay homogenous—all one language and one speech in one place. But the desire of God had been that the earth be filled. The call to Abram was to restart that process afresh, to call him out of his own country to become a father of many nations.

Now, in evangelical circles, we've turned that into a mission mindset that basically says we go to help other people. Those people out there need the gospel. But if we understand that God's purpose requires me to encounter people who are unlike me, people who see what I don't see, then it's not just those other people who need me—

I need them, to help me see what I can't see in isolation. So mission is as much for my own benefit as those to whom I go.

Rick: In a similar way, Brenda changed the way I saw Pentecost and the book of Acts. As a good evangelical, I'd always seen Pentecost as a strategic sign: the beginning of God's plan to get the gospel to the nations. But Brenda didn't think my interpretation went far enough. No, she said, Pentecost isn't just a means to the end of getting the gospel to the whole earth; it's a picture of what the gospel is intended to accomplish. That first Pentecost is an example of the gospel enfleshed in community.

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