Christian Arnold

I grew up for most of my life learning and believing that Whites and Blacks were now equal in America. I assumed that the only reason any family could be poor was because they did drugs, were involved in gangs, or made other bad decisions that led them to where they were today. At no point did I think that the system had ever failed any people in America. I believed that everyone in America had the same opportunities, started off on the same playing ground, and had the ability to lift themselves up by their bootstraps and pull themselves out of poverty.

As a millennial, I did not live through the Civil Rights Movement, but simply heard stories about it from those who had, such as from my father, who grew up in South Carolina and who would tell me about the Civil Rights marches that he witnessed when he was young. My mother made sure I learned about historical figures of the Civil Rights Movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and she always instilled in me the equality and worth of all people, no matter the color of their skin.

Over the past few years I have begun to realize the amount of racism and hatred that still exists today—particularly between many Blacks and Whites. In early 2012, Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. In late 2012, Jordan Davis was shot and killed by Michael Dunn just five miles from my house in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2014, Michael Brown was shot by police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. In 2015, nine Blacks were killed in a church in Charleston by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist. Just this past year in America, many police shootings occurred (whether committed by police or against the police) on the basis of race, including Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Why, then, had I thought that racism was no longer an issue? I had been taught that we were all equal, but why were we not talking about the fact that we were not treating each other as equals? With all of these shootings and the hatred going on in America, why hasn’t the church responded? I was left with more questions than answers.

I was asked to transcribe the words of John Perkins by Urban Loft Publishers. Before being asked to do this, I had only heard John Perkins’s name twice: once from Switchfoot’s song “The Sound (John Perkins’s Blues)” and another time from a book that he coauthored with Shane Claiborne called Follow Me to Freedom: Leading as an Ordinary Radical, which I read in high school. All I knew about him was that he was an integral part of the Civil Rights Movement. Through transcribing Perkins’s words, I have learned a great deal about his passions to bring Whites and Blacks together for the Kingdom of God.

In order to learn more about John Perkins’s life, I decided to read his bestselling book, Let Justice Roll Down. In the preface to this book, Perkins writes:

. . . only the power of Christ’s crucifixion on the cross and the glory of His resurrection can heal the deep racial wounds in both black and white people in America. Unless we see the depth of our need and unless we see the cross as the only answer, then we could see this wave of evangelical awakening someday turn into a wave of repression. For what is happening in the religious disputes of today and what happened in Nazi Germany prove that there is nothing more dangerous than latent religious prejudice and racism festering for a time beneath the surface of a light religious zeal only to explode later in violence, death, and hatred (Perkins, 2014, pp. 11–12).

When I first read this statement, I could hardly believe that this book had been written in 1976. What he was saying in his book is exactly the situation we are in as the United States today. For years many have pretended as though everything was all right and have tried to forget about the wounds that Whites inflicted upon Blacks for most of America’s history. Some talk about equality, but few have attempted to tend to the wounds, and this has resulted in violence, death, and hatred. After reading Perkins’s words, I knew this man truly understood this issue and its weight upon the people of God in America.

For many in the Christian community, John Perkins has been “a prophetic figure” in the Civil Rights movement, demonstrating how social justice and being a Christian go hand in hand (Perkins, 2014, p. 7). Perkins’s convictions about racial justice and racial reconciliation are firmly rooted in Scripture. Indeed it is his Christianity and his relationship to the risen Christ that gives him the power to speak out against injustice in his community and around the world.

John Perkins was born in Mississippi in 1930 into a poor family of sharecroppers and bootleggers. Since his mother died seven months after he was born and his father left after his mother died, Perkins was raised by his grandmother, a widow who was currently raising four of her grandchildren and had already raised 19 children of her own. When Perkins was 16, his older brother came back home from World War II with combat ribbons, a Purple Heart, and an honorable discharge, and then was killed six months later by the white deputy marshal in his hometown.

After leaving Mississippi, moving to California, marrying, and having children, Perkins sensed God calling him back to Mississippi to share the gospel with his people and to teach them how to bring themselves out of economic poverty. In Mendenhall, Mississippi, Perkins taught Bible classes, helped Blacks register to vote, and fought against segregated schools. Many Whites where he was living were afraid of what would happen if Blacks had too much power, and so in 1970 John Perkins and others were tortured by white law enforcement officers and almost beaten to death on little to no grounds.

Today John Perkins is the president of the John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation in Jackson, Mississippi. Although he only has a third-grade education, Perkins has received honorary doctorates for his work from Wheaton College, Gordon College, Huntington College, Geneva College, Spring Arbor University, North Park College, and Belhaven College, and has also been named distinguished visiting professor at Seattle Pacific University. Perkins is the author of nine books including Let Justice Roll Down, A Quiet Revolution, With Justice For All, and Beyond Charity. In addition to all of these things, Perkins has served on the board of directors for 19 organizations such as World Vision and Prison Fellowship, as well as serving on President Reagan’s Task Force on Hunger (About John Perkins, 2017).

Right now our culture is looking for answers on how to respond to this racial violence and injustice happening all across the country. Some of the most popular movies addressing these issues in recent years have been movies like 12 Years a Slave, The Help, Hidden Figures, and Selma. One of the most popular books that have recently come out is The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, which discusses (among other things) that more African Americans are in prisons now than were enslaved in 1850. With incidents of racial injustice like the ones mentioned above happening more and more, it feels as though racial tensions in our country are growing and will soon explode into constant and increasing violence.

Although the church in America resides in this culture, it seems like we are paralyzed and do not quite yet know what our response will be. Similar to how it was during the time of the Civil Rights Movement, it seems to me that much of the white church in America have simply cast a blind eye to racial injustice around them because they believe that those in authority are always justified no matter what they do and that no questions ever need be asked. Therefore, in order to interact with the culture, the church in America needs to begin to answer this question: “What is the response of the Christian community to the cries of injustice coming from Blacks both outside and inside the church?”

If anyone can help the church in America to be able to give a proper response to this question it is John Perkins who has devoted his life to helping people to understand how racial reconciliation is a biblical concept. Over the course of his life, Perkins has developed three essential components for Christian community development, also known as his Three R’s: relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution. Out of these three components, the one that is closest to the heart of the gospel (and in fact is a summary of the gospel message in one word) is reconciliation. According to Perkins, one of the organizations that he started, the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) seeks to promote three different types of reconciliation: people with God, people with other people, and people groups with other people groups (Gordon & Perkins, 2013, p. 62).

John Perkins’s primary ministry throughout his life has been to help guide others into a reconciled relationship with God through Christ. Perkins states, “Reconciling people with God is virtually inseparable from efforts to reconcile people with other people” (Gordon & Perkins, 2013, p. 63). It is only after Christians have helped people to be reconciled with God that they can begin the process of reconciliation between different people groups.

This concept is central to John Perkins’s life and is why his ministry has been so powerful. Before becoming a Christian, Perkins believed that black Christians were an “inferior people whose religion had made them gullible and submissive” and that white Christians were “part of that whole system that helped dehumanize and destroy black people” (Perkins, 2014, p. 56) It wasn’t until John Perkins was 27 years old that he finally read the Bible for himself and took Christianity seriously. Perkins decided to go to church after seeing the beauty of what it was doing in his son, Spencer’s life.

After reading the Bible, Perkins developed a passion for the Scriptures. When he returned to Mississippi, Perkins taught Bible classes and helped start the Berean Bible Church (named after the Bereans who were famous for their love of the Scriptures). The churches that Perkins had been familiar with were centered on socializing, but Perkins wanted to instill his love for the Scriptures as a focus for those in his community. Perkins said that he “wanted to catch their hearts with the truth that had caught [his] heart—that the Bible was for learning, real learning about God.”

Perkins’s reverence of Scripture has been evident time and time again as I have been transcribing his words. His passion and knowledge of the Scriptures is vast. Often when speaking, Scripture is woven into his everyday conversation and it can be hard to tell where the words he is quoting from Scripture end, and where his own words begin. Scripture is his bread and butter and is refreshing to his soul and to those around him. He particularly treasures the Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 23, and the book of Amos. Through Scripture, Perkins helps those around him be reconciled to God by helping them to understand the heart of God and his plan of redemption for the world.

So how, after we have helped others be reconciled to God, do we then begin the process of racial reconciliation between people groups? Perkins says that in order to begin this process we must acknowledge “collectively and individually that we have a race problem” (Gordon & Perkins, 2013, p. 64) Throughout most of the history of America, millions of people including Africans and Native Americans have been enslaved, mistreated, and run out of their own homes. While some Christians during this time spoke out against the evils of slavery, many followers of Christ kept silent and even developed theological rationales for why certain people should be mistreated.

In Perkins’s life many different sources expressed to him the belief that Blacks were less than Whites. Growing up working as a sharecropper, Perkins knew that he was living his “proper role” and behaving in the “accepted manner” for a black man living in Mississippi. In 1953, a year before the famous Brown vs. Board of Education case, official Mississippi Department of Education figures show that the education system believed that “each black student ‘required’ less money for his education than a white student ‘required’” and therefore the money spent on white students was more than double of that which was spent on black students. Perkins grew up with a low image of himself because of how he had been treated by those around him. Here is the situation as Perkins explains it: “Two-hundred years of slavery, followed by two or three generations of economic exploitation, political expression, racial discrimination, and educational deprivation, had created in black people feelings of inferiority, instability and total dependency” (Perkins, 2014, pp. 33, 86–87, & 101).

Yet because of his reconciliation to God, Perkins made it his ministry to bring about racial reconciliation between Blacks and Whites, where each group is able to speak openly and honestly about their perceptions of the other group, and then to ask and extend forgiveness for the sins they and/or their ancestors have committed and/or been hurt by. The United States has never formally apologized for its treatment of African Americans. Therefore this could be a great opportunity for the Christian community to lead the way in racial reconciliation.

However, it will not do to simply say, “I’m sorry.” Many more Blacks than Whites are poor, and a great cause of this is that a lot of the wealth that white people currently have was earned on the backs of slaves (Gordon & Perkins, 2013, p. 65). Therefore, although slaves were legally freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and discrimination based on race was outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many Blacks have continued to live in poverty while the wealth that they earned has remained in the hands of those who control society. What could the church do to help solve this problem? What steps could we take in our own churches to help alleviate the economic poverty of our black brothers and sisters in Christ, and also the spiritual poverty of those who do not know Christ?

If anyone is to lead the way to racial reconciliation in this “New Civil Rights Movement” it needs to be the church. John Perkins writes in his book Let Justice Roll Down that “one of the greatest tragedies of the Civil Rights Movement is that evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a crucial opportunity in history for genuine ethical action” (Perkins, 2014, p. 33). We are seeing the same types of things happen in our day that occurred during the Civil Rights Movement. What will be our response this time? Will we again watch from the sidelines and refuse to get involved? Or will we “learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, and plead the widow’s cause?” (Isa 1:17).

So what about me, the typical white Christian? What part can I play in racial reconciliation? Although I may not be able to lead the black community, as a white man, I am still capable of helping to lead the white community towards racial reconciliation. The greatest way I can do this is to make my white friends aware of the injustice that is happening to our black brothers and sisters in Christ here in this country. As a white leader in the church I need to push others towards humility and an understanding that their perceptions about people of other races may be wrong. Most of the problems of racism would fade away if those who hated one another began to get to know one another, for it is easier to hate someone you do not know than to hate someone with whom you have a relationship. In the words of John Perkins, “People remove racism” (Perkins, 2014, p. 211).

It is our duty as followers of Christ who come from many different backgrounds, cultures, degrees of wealth, and so forth, to make sure that we are promoting not only justice for our group, but “justice for all.” We cannot turn our backs on those from other cultures who are experiencing injustice, for “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (King, 2007, p. 5). Racial reconciliation through the power of the gospel is transformative for both Whites and Blacks. White people have failed to let the power of the gospel change their lives, which has led them to pursue lifestyles which are “exploitive and unjust.” If we truly want racial reconciliation to occur in our country “the gospel must be allowed to penetrate the white consciousness as well as the black consciousness” (Perkins, 2014, p. 101).

John Perkins has truly left behind a great legacy. His life is a living example of his own definition of justice: “An eternal vigilance. Seeing what is wrong, and trying to make it right” (Perkins, 2005). If you really want to come to understand John Perkins and learn more about his heart for racial reconciliation, do not solely read the books he has authored, but also listen to him speak. I have been very fortunate in this way to have the opportunity to listen to him speak, and then transcribe his words for his upcoming book. In listening to him speak, I have laughed with him, listened to him sob and cried right along with him, and most importantly felt in every word he speaks his desire for Whites and Blacks to come together. Sitting at his feet and listening to him speak in this way has given me a renewed passion to help break down racial barriers between Whites and Blacks and bring them together for the advancement of the kingdom.

After looking at the great legacy of John Perkins, the question that begs to be asked is, “Who will carry on this legacy? Who will lead this next generation in seeking racial reconciliation in America?” Many years ago, John Perkins realized that he could not carry on the task of racial reconciliation alone, and so he organized the CCDA in 1989, which was “a group of Christian leaders from across America who were bonded by one significant commitment, expressing the love of Jesus in America’s poor communities” (About–History, CCDA, 2012). Since then, the CCDA has “served more than a thousand churches or ministry organizations, and some 15,000 people are active in [their] organization.” In addition to this, the CCDA hosts an annual conference every year with attendance at around 2,500 people (Gordon & Perkins, 2013, p. 44).

The CCDA is doing something that will long outlast John Perkins and the other founders. They are providing biblical precedence for racial reconciliation (as reconciliation is one of their core values), and they are doing so in the context of communities. One of my favorite quotes from transcribing John Perkins’s words has been “What makes racial reconciliation evasive is that it’s only happening when it’s happening. It’s only happening when we are loving each other” (Perkins, 2016). Racial reconciliation is happening not when it is being talked about, but when it is being lived out. Therefore, racial reconciliation happens best in the context of our communities, when it is being lived out with the people we see on a daily basis. The CCDA is helping Christians to see reconciliation as a daily habit, and not just as something that happens once.

Another area of Christianity that is making a difference in seeking racial reconciliation is that of Christian rap. In the past year, Christian rappers (who are Black, White, and Hispanic) have begun to speak up more and more about the injustice that is occurring all over America and non-Christians are taking notice of this. One example occurred at the Black Entertainment Television Awards in 2016 when Lecrae delivered a spoken word about the oppression of Blacks, the prison system, being told to remain silent, and the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota. Another example is that of Sho Baraka, whose 2016 album The Narrative, is dedicated to how the sin of slavery is still affecting our culture today.

Finally, Propaganda’s spoken word “20 Years” that he delivered in 2016 discusses how Blacks, who were mistreated for most of America’s history, are now being asked to pretend as though those things never happened. In this spoken word, Propaganda says, “Does the cross that you say you cling to not require justice before reconciliation? How can we talk about unity if you are not ready to admit that you are wrong?” These musicians vocalize the thoughts of their communities and eloquently summarize the thoughts of Christians who are aware of the need for reconciliation. Their songs are calling the church to listen to the cries of injustice all around them and take action, and because of this more Christians in America are bringing racial reconciliation through Christ.

What John Perkins has done through his life is to lay the groundwork for reconciliation in this country. Now he is “lifting us onto his shoulders so we can get a better view and begin to face the challenges of our day.” In the words of his daughter, Elizabeth Perkins, “[his] vision of seeing justice roll down has become my vision. It has become my generation’s responsibility to carry on the torch of racial reconciliation” (Perkins, 2014, pp. 214–15). May our generation carry on this torch! May we bring together not just Blacks and Whites, but people of every cultural background! May we move our country towards a place where were we can say this statement (which is one of Perkins’s favorites) with all honesty and sincerity:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

References

About John Perkins. (2017). The John Perkins Center, Seattle Pacific University. spu.edu/depts/perkins/john-perkins/index.asp.

Gordon, W. & Perkins, J.M. (2013). Making Neighborhoods Whole: A Handbook for Christian Community Development. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books.

King Jr., M.L. (2007). Letter from Birmingham Jail: “I have a dream” Speech. New York: Perfection Learning Corp.

Perkins, J.M. Interview with Stephen Burris and Kendi Howells Douglas, June 17, 2016.

______. (2014). Let Justice Roll Down. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.

______. (2005). Racial Justice: Are We There Yet? The Veritas Forum, Conference Presentation.