A Conversation with Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam

Part 1: Exploring the Theology of Repair

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam speaking at the 48th biennial conference fo the National Black Presbyterians Caucus. Photo courtesy of PC U.S.A.) Communications.

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam is the Ministry Director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Rev. Pat Jackson (Interwoven Congregations executive director) and Roxane Rucker (former Interwoven Board member) conducted a series of personal, indepth interviews across 2023 and 2025. We are sharing those conversations in three installments.

Part I – Spiritual Roots and the Theological Imperative of Reparations

Rev. Pat Jackson (he/him):  Thank you Rev. Ross-Allam for joining us for this conversation.  How did you first get involved in the work for reparations?

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam (he/him):  I was raised in a very small town in rural south-east Texas called Willis. My hometown bears all the marks of its Jim Crow past and it's not so certain post Jim Crow present. I was raised there by my parents—Anthony and Alice Ross—as a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Christian. We attended a church in nearby Conroe, Texas named Emanuel Seventh-day Adventist Church which always had only a handful of members. That context formed my moral backbone in multiple and complex ways. Historically, Afro-American members of that denomination refused to accept the racist segregation forced upon them by their White counterparts and chose, instead, to do parish and ecclesial ministry outside of the racist structures created by White SDAs. The result of that 19^th century choice was not an early form of multi-ethnic Protestantism but, rather, a curious and absurd situation wherein my siblings and I attended a local multi-ethnic SDA school during the week in the 1980s and 90s, yet attended ethnically distinct congregations in the same town each weekend.

At the same time, I was raised to understand God as the one who created everyone in such a way that no one is better than anyone else. Thanks to my religious and home training, the fact that I was being raised where the KKK remained visibly active and where elders still referenced the same tree on the county court house lawn as a well-attested lynching site, did not shape my concept of God or of myself. Instead, the people who raised me and the faithful church people who contributed to my religious education gave me my primary understanding of who God is, what humanity is, and who I am.  At first I thought the best parts of my upbringing were normal experiences for most people. Of course, as I grew older, I observed that not everyone shared my perspective or received the same training.   

I earned my Masters of Divinity at United Theological Seminary in the Twin Cities. When I was ordained by the Presbytery of the Twin Cities Area I became a pastor in contrasting congregations.  I was an associate pastor at the 21^st Century Academy at Kwanzaa Community Church (now Liberty Community Church) where I served with Rev. Dr. Ralph Galloway and Rev. Dr. Alika Galloway.  They were, and continue to be, critical spiritual mentors in my life and ministry. Their work and legacies are central to my understanding of what it means to be a minister who has integrity, who remembers the history, and tends to the future of the Afro-American people in the Presbyterian church.  

I also took a position as associate minister for social justice at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church.  That’s where I met Elder Jim Koon. Jim and I took a car ride together one day to a men's retreat further north in Minnesota—in the dead of winter. Along the ride, we discussed recent incidents of police violence in the Twin Cities which eventually included the state killings of Philando Castile and Jim Clark.  There was something about my mood at that time that made me say to Jim something that I wasn't in the habit of saying to White church people at the time.  I told Jim, “It really doesn't make any sense to keep doing sermons about racial justice if we refuse to put on the table what really needs to be discussed. And what really needs to be discussed is reparations.”

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam with Elder Jim Koons at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church. Photo courtesy of PC U.S.A.) Communications.

At the time, Jim did not agree. But it was important for me to say what I said in that moment because a person can only talk about a problem so many times before you start to hear your own absence -- you start to hear what you are not  talking about.  Faux-leftist and quasi-progressive pastors and church folk have tended to grow wistful in discussing racism and its historic reliance on state violence through verbiage couched in the all-too-Protestant non-committal language of “hopefully,” “maybe,” and “one day” and, often devolve into talk about dreams. That rhetorical pattern bothered me a great deal, because I realized that such rhetoric has always been an effete form of U.S. American race-relations-management that did not reflect what I actually experienced or believed about God, time, or humanity. I do not now nor did I then believe human beings have no solutions to historic problems within historical time. Key aspects of my upbringing, in addition to more recent studies of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, prevented me from concluding that, while the breath of God is in my very being, there is no capacity and, therefore, I have no responsibility to solve historic problems in historical time--especially problems that have emerged through human greed and recklessness and cowardice very recently.  

Not too long after that initial conversation with Jim Koon, I began doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City where it was required that one of my qualifying doctoral exams be a public lecture. I decided to do a public lecture on the theological implications of reparations denial.  A few individuals—academics and otherwise—mildly discouraged me from that topic because they understood well that reparations to non-White men whose human property was not emancipated by the state has remained an extremely unpopular “third rail” topic since the age of emancipations.  But, with Union Theological Seminary right next door to Riverside Church where James Forman delivered the Black Manifesto in 1969, I simply had to make the most of my proximity to critical records.  My study of the Riverside Church's response to the Black Manifesto helped me understand that there is something deeply theological at stake for White Christians in the United States and beyond when it comes to denying that reparations are right, necessary and possible. And so that gave me the information that I needed to do my public lecture.  

Roxane Rucker (she/her):  What is deeply theologically at stake for white Christians and this consideration of reparations?

Jermaine:  Reparations denial requires white Christians to ask themselves what it is they believe to be true about God, themselves, and other human beings. And if we deny that reparations are right, necessarily, and possible, then we have to ask ourselves:

• Are we making the consequences of white supremacy in the United States co-eternal with God?  

  
  

• If we say that slavery was horrible, but it's too difficult, too complicated, too divisive to assess, arrest, repair its economic, political, theological, and social legacies, then do we really believe in the power of God?

  
  

If, in fact, the economic and social and political damage of slavery are beyond repair—even as many White Americans still enjoy the socioeconomic benefits accrued from the business of slavery and Jim Crow—then we are pronouncing something untenable about God's special favor on the basis of race for the people who continue to benefit from organized and legalized transgenerational theft well after the first dawn of Europe’s much-touted Enlightenment.  By naming historic evil, observing its on-going legacies in U.S. American life, and yet failing to offer reparations, Protestants in this region of the planet practice an heretical theological anthropology.

Photo by Pat Jackson

Since historic harms were and continue to be produced through the failed attempt to concoct a White republic on the wrong side of the Atlantic and reparations denial after the fact,  the theological implication—among other implications—is that Afro-Americans and Indigenous nations are created or fated  to endure forms of transgenerational dispossession that set them apart in perpetuity from the dignities of natural right that Protestants in the United States ascribe to other groups of people. Therefore, this embrace of fatalism and historic withdrawal from natural law and socioeconomic common sense requires Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and many other colonized and colonizing Christian individuals and organizations to determine whether sustained reparations denial amounts to a form of civic religious atheism that remains on the road to Emmaus toward a genuine and transformative encounter with the Gospel of Jesus. 

Next: Part II of the Conversation with Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam -- Introducing the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)