Whitworth Summit Ministry Conference returns after pandemic hiatus
News Story by Abbey Rodriguez | FāVS News
The Whitworth Summit Ministry Conference will return this summer after a 3-year hiatus following the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference, themed “Repairers of the Breach,” aims to provide resources and support for pastors in the Spokane area to navigate community and reconciliation in the current political climate.
Planning for the conference began in November, right after the 2024 presidential election.
The Rev. Mindy Smith, director of Whitworth’s Office of Church Engagement (OCE), explained that at that point the planning team didn’t “know what [we were] walking into” adding that she knew “a lot of people [were] nervous and scared, and a lot of people [were] celebrating.” Amidst all this, the team felt “a call to point to Jesus and to build up the church.”
The theme “Repairers of the Breach” developed naturally out of these planning conversations with the conference centering on Isaiah 58:12.
“We want to create room at the conference for lament, for space, for people, and we’re not going to over program it too much,” Smith said.
Featured guests
The conference will have four featured guests, including the Rev. Brenda Salter McNeil, the Rev. David Swanson, the Rev. Jer Swigart and Taylor Leonhardt.
Swanson, founding pastor of New Community Covenant Church and the founder and CEO of New Community Outreach, will speak on his work with youth in the South Side of Chicago and the role that the local church plays in reconciliation.
Swanson vocalized the importance of practicality when doing restorative work in any community.
“We try to think through the lens of repair in some really practical ways” by working with “young people [who] have experienced gun violence of some kind, sometimes trauma realtered to poverty, sometimes related to physical abuse [and other] different forms of abuse,” said Swanson.
Furthermore, Swanson emphasized that “local congregations are really poised to do this work of repair in our particular communities. Local churches are often trusted in their local communities, [and] they often have some good infrastructure already in place.”
He continued, saying those local churches often have preestablished “relational networks, and they are the ones who can often speak with authority about what the true needs in their community are.”
“I hope that what we do here in Chicago can be both inspiring, but also serve as a as an example, not of exactly what to do, but how to go about listening to your community, learning the history, learning the story, coming to love the real particularities of your community,” Swanson said.
McNeil will also speak on community restoration and reconciliation but will take on a larger scale approach to the topic. She currently serves as an associate pastor of preaching and reconciliation at Quest Church in Ballard and as an associate professor of reconciliation studies in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University.
McNeil defined reconciliation as “an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.” McNeil said she wrote this definition after realizing that “so many people Christians were talking about reconciliation, but nobody knew how to define what it was.”
McNeil’s upcoming book, “Empowered to Repair,” emphasizes the importance of reparations in addition to reconciliation by looking at practical restorative steps in the book of Nehemiah.
“I wanted a practical example of actual steps that a person must take to address brokenness in their communities” McNeil continued, “if you follow his [Nehemiah’s] process as leaders who are coming to this Whitworth conference, it says these are some very clear markers of how you know you’re starting to work toward repair.”
However, the church itself has lost much of its credibility and is in need of repair as well, McNeil argued.
She explained that the church is losing “a generation who literally can see that things aren’t changing.”
As the current political climate continues to challenge Christian identity, young people are losing hope in the church’s ability to be places of healing.
McNeil explained that without tangible actions in the direction of reconciliation, “we [the Church] won’t have credibility, because people won’t believe it.”
When thinking specifically about Spokane conference attendees, McNeil explained that the truth isn’t regional or contextual, it is universal.
The conference will take place in the Whitworth Seely G. Mudd Chapel and will run from June 24-27. The cost of attendance is $200 per person and includes an OCE 10-year celebration dinner, which will take place Thursday evening. Financial scholarships are available upon request.
For more information, visit the summit conference website or reach out to Mindy Smith at mindysmith@whitworth.edu.
Abbey Rodriguez is a theology and history major at Whitworth University, the student assistant of the Class of 2025 University Archives and the Whitworthian’s arts and culture editor.
