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145 Communities of Resurrection and the Transformation of Bodies Chris Rice much has been made, and rightly so, of john perkins as a grassroots prophet of justice for the poor and marginalized. Yet whose justice? Reaching toward what end or purpose? During the American civil rights movement, Will Campbell argued in Race and the Renewal of the Church that in a world of racism and poverty, the church had adopted a largely humanitarian approach around freedom, justice, and democracy. “These things are good,” said Campbell,“but are they the most basic, most distinctive concern of the church?” To be true to the church’s own nature something “far more radical” was needed. “The sin of the church is not that it has not reformed society, but that it has not realized self-renewal,” wrote Campbell.“Its sin is that it has not repented.Without repentance there cannot be renewal.”1 In this chapter I illuminate the significance of John Perkins’s life and ministry for answering this challenge of something “far more radical”— namely, that the true end of justice across social divides is a call to conversion toward becoming new people in a community of friendship, how this happens through a deeply embodied life of repentance and grace that is local, and what this has to say about the mission and ministry of the church in a divided world. I discuss Perkins renowned three Rs (relocation, reconciliation , and redistribution) as spiritual works of bodily conversion across social divides to unlearn habits of division, self-sufficiency, superiority, and inferiority toward a new future of mutuality and friendship. This is, I argue, not only a more radical but a more beautiful vision of our identities, loyalties , and habits being reformed into God’s“new we.” Seeing this“new we” as the end of justice in bodily and communal form offers a powerful new local and global missional paradigm for a U.S. Christian church that (in Perkins’s words) has“over-evangelized the world too lightly.”2 146 Chris Rice JP AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUSSHAPED PHYSICALITY “JP” or “Grandpa.” That’s what my wife, Donna, our children, and I affectionately call him in the Rice family. I met him in 1980 when I was a student at Middlebury College in Vermont. After hearing his strange Mississippi story, matched by the lines in his face and earthiness of his manner, my life was never the same. At the end of his Vermont visit I drove JP and his assistant to the airport. It was early morning, and I had just rolled out of bed. It was February, it was freezing, and my car had no heat and a hole in the floor. JP was undeterred. He flipped open his Bible and did a spontaneous , energetic devotional. It was as if he was preaching to 2,000—not two. The powerful physicality of JP’s presence over those days made a profound impression on me. That day in 1980, social justice was at the margins of American evangelicalism . It isn’t anymore, and JP’s teaching and ministry were at the heart of that transformation.Today a whole new generation of restless young Christians take for granted what was fresh and new to me as a young Christian. Two years after that airport drive, I was in Jackson, Mississippi, at JP’s Voice of Calvary Ministries, volunteering for six months with no inkling that I would stay seventeen years. The community there had been abandoned by the white church when black folks moved in. It was abandoned by the black church when many black folks moved up and out. What JP said—what he’s kept saying all these years—is that a particular kind of infected American Christianity, a virus that does not discriminate racially, is captive to individualism, selfishness, and greed. This captivity can only be unlearned over time.One place of conversion is abandoned communities at the margins, and that little inner-city zip code in west Jackson was a testing ground for a Christian antidote. That’s where we would learn a new kind of Christianity, a hope hammered out through a deep and intimate kind of physicality shared with strangers and with God—locally, daily, eating together, singing together, worshipping together, working together across deep divides like race and class. What I learned is that this vision was in fact a very big idea, because in light of our peculiar American...

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