Seminary Dropout Dominique Gilliard and Scripture’s Call to Leverage Privilege
Dominique DuBois Gilliard is the Director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation for the Love Mercy Do Justice (LMDJ) initiative of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). He is the author of Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores, which won the 2018 Book of the Year Award for InterVarsity Press. Gilliard also serves on the board of directors for the Christian Community Development Association and Evangelicals for Justice. In 2015, he was selected as one of the ECC’s “40 Under 40” leaders to watch, and HuffPost named him one of the “Black Christian Leaders Changing the World.”
An ordained minister, Gilliard has served in pastoral ministry in Atlanta, Chicago, and Oakland. He was executive pastor of New Hope Covenant Church in Oakland, California and also served in Oakland as the associate pastor of Convergence Covenant Church. He was also a campus minister at North Park University and the racial righteousness director for ECC’s ministry initiatives in the Pacific Southwest Conference.
Dominique earned a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies from Georgia State University and a master’s degree in history from East Tennessee State University, with an emphasis on race, gender, and class in the United States. He also earned an MDiv from North Park Seminary, where he served as an adjunct professor teaching Christian ethics, theology, and reconciliation.
You can follow Dominique on Twitter: @DDGilliard, and on Instagram: @dominiquedgilliard.
Privilege is a social consequence of our unwillingness to reckon with and turn from sin. But properly stewarded, it can help us see and participate in God’s inbreaking kingdom. Scripture repeatedly affirms that privilege is real and declares that, rather than exploiting it for selfish gain or feeling immobilized by it, Christians have a responsibility to leverage it.
Subversive Witness asks us to grapple with privilege, indifference, and systemic sin in new ways by using biblical examples to reveal the complex nature of privilege and Christians’ responsibility in stewarding it well. – From the Publisher