Source: Huffington Post | Ken Wytsma
Lisa Sharon Harper is currently the Senior Director of Mobilizing for Sojourners. She previously served as the founding executive director of New York Faith & Justice. In that capacity she helped establish Faith Leaders for Environmental Justice, a city-wide collaborative effort of faith leaders committed to leveraging the power of their constituencies and their moral authority in partnership with communities bearing the weight of environmental injustice. She also organized faith leaders to speak out for immigration reform and organized the South Bronx Conversations for Change, a dialogue-to-change project between police and the community. . . Lisa is the author of Left Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics and Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican or Democrat and recently co-authored Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith with Mae Elise Cannon, Troy Jackson and Soong-Chan Rah.
 
KW: How did you choose the topics you addressed in the individual chapters of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith?
 
LSH: It’s important to understand the diverse nature of the team of authors, to understand how we chose the topics. We are a team of two women and two men; two historians and two theologians; two white evangelicals and two evangelicals of color. At our core, we are products of the evangelical church, specifically, and the American church, more broadly. While some of us might identify with the ones who sinned and others with those sinned against in one chapter, in the next chapter the one sinned against might find that he or she is the sinner. Sin knows no racial or gender bounds. So, first and foremost we all considered the chapters from the perspective of our collective broader identity—the church. And we asked ourselves: “As the church, how have we sinned against the world?” From there it was clear: racism, gender injustice, sin against indigenous peoples, sin against immigrants, sin against Jews and Muslims, sin against the LBGTQ community, and sin against the rest of God’s creation. These are the sins non-Christians hold against Christ and the church—and rightfully so. We have never repented—not collectively. So, these are the sins we would confront and confess in our book.