Repairing the Sins of the Past with Duke Kwon

Rasool Berry

How being willing to let go and learn from others allows us to repair broken relationships.

How do you walk with someone you fully disagree with and not hold scorn or contempt for them in your heart? Duke Kwon, pastor and writer of Reparations: A Christian Call to Repentance and Repair joins VOICES’ Where Ya From? podcast to remind us that everyone—even people who have hurt us—is crowned with dignity because they are made in God’s image. God breaks His light of truth through even the most unlikely people and places—which means we can learn something from everyone, everywhere. Join us to rethink how being willing to let go and learn from others allows us to repair broken relationships.

Guest Bio:

Duke Kwon is the lead pastor of Grace Meridian Hill, a neighborhood congregation in the GraceDC Network in Washington, DC, and co-author of Reparations: A Christian Call to Repentance and Repair. He completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University (AB, Political Science) and received his MDiv and ThM degrees from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Duke has been active in public conversations around race, equity, and racial repair in the American church, and lectures on these topics around the country. He and his wife Paula live in the Columbia Heights neighborhood together with their three children.

Notes & Quotes:

…To be able to walk alongside folks and not have a latent scorn for their view of the world or their political convictions or of their moral differences. To actually be able to say, “Let’s walk, let’s talk” and not to have a quiet contempt for them in my heart.
Every person is crowned with dignity because of whatever belief system they subscribe to, whatever difference they might have with the Christian faith, they are crowned with glory. And we need to treat them that way.
Reparations are built on the root word repair. So specifically, it’s talking about the repair of broken things. It comes to mean the deliberate repair of theft.
There’s been a theft of power and there’s also been a theft of truth, the truth about African American identity, the truth of God’s Word in the Christian context, the truth about American history that too has been robbed where we need to then restore and repair each of these different spheres and dimensions of theft.

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