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Faculty and Staff

John M. Perkins

“In my short time in the Perkins Center and the University, I have witnessed a great deal of courage as our students, staff, and faculty wrestle with their fears in the midst of University-wide conversations around race and disparity. I say they are fighting the good fight and I believe it is good because it is taking us ever closer to the heart of God’s reconciling work in this world.”

— Paul Kim, Coordinator for Global Engagement and Small Groups, John Perkins Center


Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development

The Center offers links to articles and videos around the issues of diversity including “creating an inclusive classroom,” “white fragility,” and “identifying and preventing microaggressions.”

Subject Guide on Diversity, Race, and Reconciliation

The SPU Library has compiled an online subject guide on “Diversity, Race, and Reconciliation,” which includes links to books, articles, video, blogs, social media, and websites. The guide is continually updated. You can register to get email alerts whenever guides of interest to you are published.

Student Support Team

The team identifies and supports students who are struggling academically, socially, or personally. The team consists of Student Life professionals who provide appropriate and timely interventions for students in need of assistance and guidance. Learn how you can refer a student to the team.

Reconciliation Initiative Task Force

The purpose of the Reconciliation Initiative Task Force is “To develop a seamless mixture of curricular and co-curricular programing and to identify structural changes that will be needed to ensure that every student at SPU encounters the call of the gospel to work for reconciliation and begins to develop the cross-cultural competencies necessary to facilitate this work.” Learn more about this task force, and view key accountability resources lock.

Faculty and staff members

Faculty, staff, and students attend an SPU forum titled “Race in America After Ferguson” in October 2014.

Global Initiative Task Force

The Global Initiative Task Force was created to design and implement a plan to “give programmatic expression” to SPU’s mission statement. “In its signature commitments and growing out of its Christian identity, Seattle Pacific University has promised to be a place that helps its students understand and engage our diverse, multicultural, and complex world. Learn more about this task force, and view key accountability resources lock.

In Context

In Context is a quarterly discussion series to talk about race, diversity, and reconciliation. This Associated Students of Seattle Pacific group meets every quarter for six weeks and has a limited number of participants. Through articles, movies, open discussions, writing, and fellowship, participants learn realities of race relations and its impact on our stories. Although mainly for students, faculty and staff can participate.

Xu Bian

Why I Teach at SPU

Xu Bian, Assistant Professor of Chinese

I teach at SPU because the community is embracing diversity, becoming more culturally competent, and practicing inclusion. I have long believed that learning a foreign language makes a person more flexible and open to other cultures. My aim is to equip students to be multilingual and have the advantage of seeing the world from different vantage points.

John Perkins and Susan Okamoto Lane

A biblical mandate for reconciliation

“An understanding of the biblical mandate for reconciliation should begin with Jesus Christ. Without his suffering and subsequent victory over pain and death, there would be no reconciliation of God to humanity. Christ’s agony was far beyond our comprehension, and yet without it, we would still be separated from God. We are called to enter into Christ’s pain by taking up our own cross and following the Great Reconciler.”

— John Perkins, “Biblical Reconciliation”

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