Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins

Introduction

xiii INTRODUCTION Peter Slade john m. perkins is a truly extraordinary man whose history and influence defy easy categorization. An African American fundamentalist Bible teacher and preacher, a third grade dropout, a recipient of honorary doctorates from numerous universities and colleges, an adviser to presidents , an author, public speaker, entrepreneur, provocateur, and community developer, he is the founding organizer and spiritual leader of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA)—a coalition of over 200 churches and community projects working in economically depressed neighborhoods. Perhaps surprisingly, despite receiving honorary doctorates, Perkins’s life, work, and influence have received surprisingly little attention from the academy.1 The conviction of the contributors to this volume is that this situation needs to be rectified. Perkins is a significant figure in the history of the evangelical and American church. Furthermore, the lived theology implicit in his life, ministry, and the faith communities he has established and the theology explicit in his preaching and writing are important resources for critical reflection. Consider this scene. It is nine o’clock on a bright Mississippi spring morning in West Jackson. Thirty students—the T-shirts read Wheaton, Duke, Eastern Nazarene, and Ashland—sit along both sides of a long line of white folding tables.With notepads and Bibles at the ready, they listen with rapt attention to John Perkins—the short animated figure with huge hands preaching from the end of the room. He has placed the treasure of His love in these earthen vessels. This is the most difficult place he could put it. Because the idea is those vessels have got to be cracked. They’ve got to take pain because they’ve got to enter into other people’s pain. And because they have been broken in humility and cracked, now they can let the light shine out! xiv introduction This is not empty rhetoric, and the students know it—that is why they are here. Perkins’s history and his body carry the scars of a lifetime of entering into the pain of others. “That’s the most difficult task because we run away from brokenness,” Perkins continues.“We run away from pain in life.” The students respond to the authenticity of this man’s witness and to his apparent humility: they want to choose costly discipleship; they want to be broken earthen vessels. These students are participants in a well-established evangelical pilgrimage to Mississippi. Since the early 1970s thousands of earnest young Christians —mostly white and mostly evangelical—have traveled to Mendenhall and Jackson to Voice of Calvary and John Perkins.It is here in Mississippi— the scene of the crime—that these students from across America come to learn the truths of the gospel.“And so what is this central truth in Christianity ?” Perkins asks. The central truth to Christianity then is that we have a leader. He’s alive. He comes back to live in us with the Holy Spirit. He comes back to live among us when we gather together. And where two or three are gathered together in his name he is there and there is the possibility of goodness. This is the heart of Perkins’s theology: the church, constituted by Christ, is a community that can make a unique and essential difference to our neighborhoods and to society. That this is a new message to so many American evangelicals and that it is brought to them by such an unlikely prophet is startling and worth consideration.At eighty years of age,Perkins is still passionate about this mission and communicating it to others. Caught by the power of his own rhetoric, Perkins pauses: Man, that makes me want to cry. That we can do good! I really desire to do something for God. I think most people want to do something for God. I think that is why you are here.2 Why are they there? What significance does this man’s remarkable life and work have for understanding the evangelical church in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What does Perkins’s theology of racial introduction xv reconciliation and his ecclesiology of community development and urban renewal have to say to a new generation of American Christians faced with the problems of a postindustrial society in the grips of the great recession and the challenges of immigration and globalization? That morning...