This is John Perkins. He died at the age of 95 this month. I’ve been thinking about him a lot since he died, so much so that I need to share his story with you today. We’re on the final Great End of the Church, the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world, and John Perkins did just that.
He was born in Mississippi in 1930, the youngest of six. His mother, Maggie, died when John was only a few months old of pellagra, a chronic vitamin deficiency related to malnutrition. His father left the family. John went to live with his paternal grandmother and extended family, who were sharecroppers and bootleggers. John quit school in third grade to go to work picking cotton. By the age of 12 he was making 15 cents a day, but noticed that white people doing the same work were making $2 a day.
When he was 16, his older brother Clyde returned home from serving in the Army in World War II. He had a run-in with the town marshal, who shot Clyde in the stomach twice for talking back and grabbing the marshal’s club after being hit with it. John held Clyde in the back seat of the car as they rushed to a hospital in Jackson that would accept black patients. By the time they arrived, Clyde was dead.
John moved to a suburb of Los Angeles to get away from the violence of Mississippi. He served in the Army during the Korean War. When he returned, he became a janitor at a grocery store. The owner was impressed with John’s work ethic and promoted him to a department where he made grocery carts. He was settling into a middle class life with his wife, Vera Mae, whom he married in 1951.
John was not a church-goer, but his growing family went. He was beginning to encounter the emptiness of his life that was focused solely on himself and material gain. One day his son, Spencer, came home from church singing that old song many of you probably know.
“Jesus loves the little children,” Spencer sang, “all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” While that song sounds dated today, back in the 1950s, it pierced John’s heart. For a black man who had grown up in the segregated South, he was stunned that Jesus’ love welcomed people of all races together. He began going to church with his four-year-old son, where he saw blacks and whites worshipping together for the first time in his life.
He began attending Bible studies and later joined in a prison ministry effort. There he was horrified to see so many black teens locked up so close to his home. In a later interview, he shared, “It was the first time in my life that I realized that in sharing the gospel, it was possible God could transform, and take what I had shared and affect other people’s lives.”
Perkins was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1958. God called him back to Mississippi to share the life-changing good news of Jesus with his people and to break the cycle of despair. He moved to Mendenhall, a town southeast of Jackson.
In this era of civil rights protests, Perkins organized a voter-registration drive in 1965 in his home county. In 1969 he led a boycott against local white retailers who wouldn’t hire black workers. In 1970, he went to a jail in the neighboring county to bail out students involved in his ministry who were part of the boycott. On the way, the Mississippi Highway patrol pulled him over for “reckless driving.” They jailed Perkins, claiming he had tried to hit an officer and that they had shotguns in the car. He was charged with inciting a riot, resisting arrest, and possessing a concealed deadly weapon.
While in custody, he was beaten by the sheriff and his deputies. They kicked him in the head, stomach, and groin. They shoved a bent fork up his nose and down his throat. Beaten to the point of death, he had a heart attack and lost two-thirds of his stomach in surgery. As he recovered in the hospital, he focused on Jesus’ suffering and forgiveness. He would later write, “When I saw what hate had done to them, I couldn’t hate back. I could only pity them. I didn’t ever want hate to do to me what it had already done to those men.”
After recovering, he found the gospel-centered purpose he would spend the rest of his life devoted to. The gospel was not merely about saving souls. It was about lifting people out of despair. He doubled-down on his ministry, relocating it to a poor neighborhood in Jackson. He taught that faith leaders could best help impoverished communities by connecting spiritual nourishment with fostering social and economic uplift. He called it the “whole Gospel.”
This work and his writings opened doors to speak at Billy Graham rallies. Graham had insisted that his crusades be racially integrated. At one of their planning meetings, Perkins asked white pastors how they would respond if a black person who converted at the crusade showed up in their church the next Sunday. Would they turn their brother away? he wondered.
He founded the Christian Community Development Association, where thousands of individuals, churches, and agencies, united to help the poor achieve self-sufficiency through meaningful work, affordable homes, and spiritual salvation. Speaking to The Baltimore Sun in 1994 Perkins said, “The highest calling of God is to love your neighbor as you love yourself.” His mission was “styled on the life of Jesus, who had the greatest concern for the weakest of people.”
Ever since his return to Jackson, Perkins got to work in his neighborhood, applying how he believed that conversion to Christianity changed lives eternally and right at the moment. His local work and publications grew his notoriety. By the time he died, this man with a third-grade education had published 17 books and received 19 honorary doctoral degrees. The band Switchfoot wrote a song about him called “The Sound.” Both Calvin and Seattle Pacific Universities developed programs named after him that promoted his teachings to their students interested in reconciliation and development. Last week, Perkins’ body even laid in state in Jackson City Hall, quite a turnaround from where he started.
I got to know John Perkins back in the early 2000s. Jess had been working for a Christian development organization. They sent us to New York City to attend the Christian Community Development Association’s conference. It was there I first heard him speak. Within a year, he came to the church we were attending in Grand Rapids. His involvement with Calvin was growing, and he invited the folks from the church to come to Jackson to work with him. I’ll never forget what he said. It was late spring, so Michigan was covered in blooms. “You white people are great at planting flowers. You should come to Jackson to plant flowers.”
A couple of years later, Jess and I had moved to Ann Arbor. We were sharing a campus ministry position at the church. We had taken John Perkins’ words to heart, so we brought around two dozen Michigan students with us for a spring break service project. We didn’t help plant flowers, but we did pour a sidewalk. We also did daily Bible studies with John Perkins himself. With confidence I can say that engaging with John Perkins helped shape how I view the church, ministry, reconciliation, and the hard work we have to do as Christians of exhibiting the kingdom of heaven to the world.
This Lent, I’ve asked us to focus on the Great Ends of the Church. We’ve done this in sermons. We’ve incorporated it into our midweek Taizé services. The Great Ends capture the broad mission of the church. To bring them back to mind they are:
- The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind
- The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God
- The maintenance of divine worship
- The preservation of the truth
- The promotion of social righteousness, and
- The exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world.
While the Great Ends are kind of like children — you really shouldn’t say you have a favorite — if you forced me to pick one, it would be the last. The church is to show the world what it means to live today the reality of Jesus’ reign.
That’s what John Perkins did for sure. That’s what we should strive to do as well. Think about it. If John Perkins wasn’t convinced that Jesus could make a difference in communities, why would he ever have left his comfortable life in suburban Los Angeles? Yet, he saw the world as it is and as it could be by the power of God’s love taking root in communities. It’s not without difficulty or conflict. John’s story makes that clear. But he strived towards that higher goal to win the prize.
Let’s be real: none of us are John Perkins. Yet, each of us is also capable of exhibiting the kingdom of heaven to the world. It’s an alternative to the way things are in a world that is filled with so much hurt and pain and violence. It’s the way of love. John Perkins had shirts made that said “Love is the final fight.” It’s his line that is part of Switchfoot’s song about him.
Speaking about this song, their singer Jon Foreman said, “The Sound (John Perkins’ Blues) is a very important song for us as a band. I see so much hatred and fear around me, I see so many people living out their pain. I hear it on the radio. I see it in the headlines. John Perkins’ story needs to be heard. This song was inspired by a man who sang a louder song than hatred. In a world where we are defined by our differences, Mr. Perkins’ life of service and compassion is a tangible demonstration of what it means to live a life of love. Love is the loudest song we could sing. Louder than racism. Louder than fear. Louder than hatred. John Perkins said it right, love is the final fight.”
John chose the path of love. God calls all Christians to the path of love. This is how we exhibit the kingdom of heaven to the world. More than any time during my life, I have found that I need reminded about the path of love. I’m learning to filter everything through that lens, and if it’s found wanting, then it’s surely not exhibiting the kingdom of heaven to the world. That’s true for my words and conduct, but it’s also true for how others treat me, for how we treat our neighbors, for how we view and treat others stretching far beyond our community.
In Galatians 5, Paul boils this down to what we call the fruit of the Spirit. “Live by the Spirit,” he urges. What does that look like? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Do your thoughts and actions embody this fruit? Do the words of pastors, teachers, podcasters, public servants, and others embody them? When they don’t, it’s not coming from the Spirit of God.
In another writing, Paul boils it down like this. “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life in peace…. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
Being people who exhibit the kingdom of heaven to the world isn’t complicated, but it is a daily choice for all of us. I’ll close with a poem that a friend shared with me this week since it so clearly captured this. It’s called “The Question.”All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rise, as
I wake my children, as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close behind the slow
blue Subaru, Is this the path of love?
Think of these words as I stand in line
at the grocery store,
think of them as I sit on the couch
with my daughter. Amazing how
quickly six words become compass,
the new lens through which to see myself
in the world. I notice what the question is not.
Not, “Is this right?” Not,
“Is this wrong?” It just longs to know
how the action of existence
links us to the path to love.
And is it this? Is it this? All day,
I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain
of the answer. Is it this?
Is this the path of love? I ask
as I wait for the next word to come.