Although she was accustomed to preaching before thousands of listeners, she was terrified to take part in a street protest: she worried that she would get trapped in a crowd and attacked by the police. вЂњThe message was put up or shut up,вЂќ Salter McNeil said. вЂњWe are meeting on the steps of the municipal court building at 4 P.M. They experienced us as not simply irrelevant but on the wrong side of justice.вЂќ The next day, the activists sent a text to the evangelical leaders. вЂњIt was that night that I really understood how disappointed young people of color had become with the church. вЂњThey said, вЂIt seems like you work harder to keep people out of the church than to let them in.вЂ™В вЂќ The more she listened, the more Salter McNeil began to think that the activists had a point.

вЂњThey told us that they hated the churchвЂ™s misogyny and hypocrisy, and how we treated L.G.B.T.Q. That evening, when Salter McNeil and others asked the activists how the church could support them, the young activists expressed their rage. In addition, they took issue with what they saw as the churchвЂ™s culture of homophobia and misogyny.

To the young activists in Ferguson, the churchвЂ™s failure to address systemic racial injustice in the United States rendered American Christian leaders like Salter McNeil part of the problem. Her workshops focussed on inspiring personal stories but left listeners with few practical tools to root out racism in their communities. She also stayed away from topics such as sexuality and abortion, for fear that sheвЂ™d be labelled a liberal with a hidden agenda.

When she spoke, she explicitly avoided talking about aspects of structural racism, such as the racial wealth gap, or the high death rate of Black mothers during childbirth she sought to insure that her sermons were rooted in the Bible and not, as she saw it, in politics. For the previous thirty years, she had touted reconciliation around the world, often addressing tens of thousands of listeners, mostly conservative white evangelicals, at conferences and megachurches. Salter McNeil-who became Christian at the age of nineteen and went on to receive a master-of-divinity degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, where she began to identify as evangelical-was one of the most prominent figures in the racial-reconciliation movement.

Several of the religious leaders who came that day were proponents of a church movement called racial reconciliation, which seeks to end racism by addressing it as a sin in individuals that can be eradicated through Biblical study, confession, and prayer. Salter McNeil, who is in her fifties and wears thick-rimmed glasses, had come with a handful of other evangelical leaders on a pilgrimage sponsored by Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization, to ask the activists what role the church should take in addressing police brutality against people of color. In the four months since Michael Brown, a local eighteen-year-old, had been fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a police officer, Ferguson had become the national center of protest against police violence and the proving ground for the new Black Lives Matter movement some of the activists running Ferguson Action went on to lead the B.L.M. One December evening, in 2014, Brenda Salter McNeil, a pastor and Black evangelical leader, descended into a church basement in Ferguson, Missouri, to meet with young activists from a broad-based group called Ferguson Action.

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