Fifteen years ago, in 1960, John Perkins and his wife, Vera Mae, packed themselves, their kids, and their belongings into a 1955 Chevrolet Sedan and a small U-Haul trailer. They were leaving their home in California, their large house, their jobs. They were returning to their place of birth, the state which had killed John’s brother and many other black people: Mississippi. Not very many folks thought it was a wise decision to return. But since committing himself to Christ in 1957. John had nurtured a special burden for his people at home.
For the first half of their ministry, the Perkins did little besides preaching the Gospel in schools, under a tent that they bought for $400, in homes out in the rurals. As the ministry grew, they began to deal with people’s felt needs through which they could also preach the gospel. A buying club, a tutoring school, a co-op store, a housing development -- all became expressions of God’s visible love for poor black people.
There were many obstacles. Lack of money, lack of skills, human violence that almost . took John’s life, floods that threatened to wipe out the work.
This interview was made during a historic time. The day before, the Voice of Calvary signed the purchase agreement on a used, fully equipped health center in uptown Mendenhall. It makes real the fulfillment of God’s promises to the small group who began Voice of Calvary. It marks the first time black people have cracked the white uptown economic structure. It moves the health center out of flood danger. It creates countless opportunities to improve the healing message and service of Jesus Christ to poor people, and extends both to the white community in ways never before imagined.
After working for 15 years in the black communities of Mississippi, what do you consider to be the greatest need in the black community today?
Well, of course, the need will vary from one community to another. But in terms of the black community in general, money is always thought to be the need of every community. Now, that answer is easy to come up with since blacks have been economically deprived, and that deprivation is the whole nature of the black struggle in this country. But at any one given time, in any one given community, that answer may be too simple and even destructive.
To me, the most crucial need in the black community today is the need for creative leadership. The business of human development is so difficult and complex that the need from the perspective of a person working within a given community is simply to know what to do next. We do not need leaders with answers that are quick and easy, structural rather than aimed at developing people. We need leaders with a burning concern, who see the depth of the problems and don’t know how to deal with them but who can listen to the Holy Spirit for God’s vision and listen to people, often outsiders, who have technical skills and experience needed to wrestle with the problems.
Money alone cannot deal with family relationships, drug problems, crime, or racism. Now these needs, once established, cannot be attacked without some kind of economic base, but likewise, the economic base without creative black leadership is welfare.
How do you relate what you are doing in trying to develop black leaders and an economic base in the black community with your Christian faith?
To me, developing creative leadership is the most essential and the most difficult part of community development. And it was at the heart of Jesus' strategy. Jesus did not make the mistake of the charismatic leader who centers his programs around himself. The strategy of Jesus, which he passed on to his disciples, is simply outlined in 2 Timothy 2 where Paul instructs: “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men and women who will be able to teach others also.”
Now the key is that men and women dedicated to working in their community must seek training from several sources. First, from the Spirit of God comes dedication, endurance, but most important, humility ... you just cannot think that you know all the answers. Humility is a necessary thing in order for a person to tap two other crucial sources: community people on a grassroots level -- to be able to listen to their uneducated advice and explanations and wisdom and not go comparing it with shiny rhetoric that sounds better but doesn’t work; and technical resources -- people with skills in management, health care, accounting, construction, and so on. Without humility, or essentially knowing who I am before the Lord, I will be threatened by both the local people and the technicians whom I need in order to pull together something creative.
What do you find to be the greatest human obstacle in the way of community development in Mississippi?
Well, racism on the part of the traditional white community power structure is the greatest obstacle. But there is another, not as obvious. There are some folks, some would call them “pimps,” who say “give me the community and get me the resources and I will develop the community.” Many young folks coming back from college have this attitude. But although they are an obstacle, they are no threat, simply because they do not know where the power is at. The power, again, is not in a program you get funded. The power is in the people. Now the pimps say this as rhetoric, but their real motive is power for themselves. But to know, to be humbled enough by God to know that the people you work with really have the power frees you from all the manipulation that it takes to get a program going without the people.
During the first seven or eight years of our ministry, all my wife and I did was to teach the Bible and to teach folks how to read it. We spoke to over 10,000 school children each month. God took us into homes for rural home Bible studies, and around the county in a tent. That’s why if I ever go to a church in the country, they will always listen to what I have to say, even my enemies. That’s why I can make some of the people work and do things for me who absolutely hate me. That’s why whenever I am at Jackson State, students, who I can seldom name, come up to say hi. And when you’re with the people, even if funds get cut off, you will never starve. People would give us eggs, milk, vegetables, potatoes -- everything we needed in those early days to keep the family and the ministry alive. With a base like that, you are really in a position to preach the gospel, no strings attached. And now, as we reopen our health center, we have a constituency who believe that God is at work at the Voice of Calvary and are willing to defend whatever Voice of Calvary does because they helped create it.
What kind of success have you had in passing on the strategy of creative community leadership?
You assume that we have had success. Now we have, but not without failure. I really believe that your strength and weakness are all wrapped up together, and you have just hit upon the strength and weakness of the Voice of Calvary. If we have succeeded it has been with key individuals. In our first years I led a group of older men in Bible study -- Rev. Robert Clayton, Joe Gene Walker and his brother Eugene, Jessie Newsome, and R.A. Buckley. All of these men are now leaders, pastors, or deacons in their churches. Then we developed a strategy for young people, to see them come to Christ and then to send them out of Mississippi’s closed society to get an education.
As I look at our present staff, my heart is filled up because what I see is some folks like Dolphus and Rosie Weary, Herbert Jones, Artis and Carolyn Fletcher who have returned to a ministry that absolutely grinds up fictitiousness. You soon find out that if your objective is human development, that you cannot fake it. You can fake a program, but you can’t fake development. If you are going to succeed you have to constantly look at your programs and evaluate them. If the results are poor you have failed. That failure has to be either in the program or in you. If it's in the program or vehicle for development, then the program goes. If its in you, then you must see it and change. In that kind of situation, the most important quality a person can have is sheer, dogged endurance based on a relationship with God. We have those kind of people now, and so I have a lot of hope. We have lost many people without that quality along the way, and for that I am sorry.
How well does the educational system in terms of schooling prepare people to return to their communities and develop them?
The educational system prepares young people to the extent that it gives them skills. I am saddened by the number of smart black students who go to the university to study sociology, anthropology, psychology, or just plain liberal arts. To me this underlines a need for identity and direction that the church should be but is not providing.
But there are students who are majoring in accounting, engineering, business administration and management, and the sciences of health care who can return and plug right in to the needs of their community.
But also, the educational system can be very damaging in the promises that it makes. It can transplant the “American system” into the minds of young people by promising those young people a piece of the system. That is a false promise. The very top rung of the ladder of education, which most blacks will never reach anyway, reaches only part way up the system. It reaches up to the point where established privilege such as wealth and inheritance begin and the power in the American system is beyond and above that point -- where no blacks and few whites can go. We are just now developing a center in Jackson designed to deal with this, to take young blacks at Jackson State and other campuses who are getting the necessary skills and get their minds out of the system by bringing them into touch with the transforming values of the kingdom of God. We are doing this through the Jackson Bible Institute, an expansion of Voice of Calvary in Mississippi’s capital city.
Another problem with the educational system is the way it can rob people of hope and initiative. Most people getting out of school see the problem--they see the poverty, the injustice, the racism, the loneliness. But they see no solution. They don’t understand the power of an idea. Many see ideas in terms of textbook history, that the great ideas reaching people are somehow mysteriously created by the flow of written history itself. They don’t understand that God gives ideas and has a whole book of them and that these and other ideas are not just nice things to think and debate about. An idea is something you implement.
Students lose the concept that an idea is something which becomes meaningful only when you tie your energy and resources to it. That is the power behind the Voice of Calvary. It shows what happens when a group of people get an idea, especially one that they believe is inspired by God, and put all of their little resources behind it. So students see the youth center, the co-op store, the housing development, the health center, all in the poor, black, and formerly hopeless section of town and they gain hope. That’s the role of a model. You can change so much easier by doing what you want, putting flesh on it, and then communicating it by showing it to other people. When all you do is work for change or reform from within, what can you show someone? A larger minority vote here, an elected official there, but no fleshed-out vision.
So again, it all comes back to creative leadership.
That’s right. Creative enough to use the tools of the educational system without being enslaved by its mentality and assumptions. To me, students are being given a very shady device. In the black community we call it jive. In the white community you call it rhetoric. It is the ability to surround an idea with words and the energy of talk without a plan for action. Anyone in grassroots community development or in just verbally preaching the gospel knows that talk is important, but only as a means to an end. The point is that if someone comes along with an idea and talks and talks about it and knows it is going to work and all of his or her individual power and life is witnessing to the fact that this idea works, people will get excited and organize with that person around that idea and the opposition will be crushed. That’s what Paul meant when he said in 1 Corinthians 4:20 that “the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power.”
Something you said about the American system made me wonder about your concept of change. You have been involved in social action and change for over 15 years in Mississippi. What is the nature of change? Does it come from getting inside the system and working to reform it or from working from outside the system?
To me, there are only two basic components of change. The first is the cross of Christ and the second is individual action. The cross separates the idea of reform, or improving something, from the idea of rebirth, putting the old to death and starting completely over. Individual action is where change begins. The roots of every great historical movement have been with individuals acting upon what they believe, working it down into their everyday life. This is crucial.
The change that the cross brings in society is wrapped up in what should be the most life-changing decision a person makes when he comes into a relationship with Jesus: to join the body of believers. The local body of Christ is to be Christ in the world today, to live with the same concerns and to act upon them by spending the lives of the members within it. We really experienced this here in Mississippi during the civil rights movement through both the exhaustion of giving all of our time and energy getting people mobilized to vote, to set up co-ops, to boycott, and eventually for some in almost losing our lives through beatings and physical violence.
Many folks believe that change comes from working within the present structure. Change can come about that way. But that change can be either good or bad. And the change is not rebirth.
I really believe that when the Bible says “come ye out from among them and be ye separate,” and “be not conformed to this world,” and “love not the world nor the things in the world,” that it is not just calling us away from something but also calling us to something. Jesus didn’t just say “repent,” but followed it up with the promise that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” I think God calls us to something better and more healthy than the systems that are presently operating.
To me working within the system for reforming change is at the heart a love for the world. It comes from an unwillingness to see that there are things very fundamentally wrong with this country, a basic unwillingness to see that my own comfort is directly related to my neighbor’s discomfort. Reformers have a tendency to see poverty, disease, illiteracy, racism, crime, and related situations as problems or issues that are isolated rather than tumors of a sickness that is malignant and terminal and growing just beneath the surface of our national life. From the perspective of the cross, however, these tumors need to be cut out to the roots before true change can take place.
I cannot work within the system to change it. My whole background and experience speak against it. I have seen too many people lose their lifestyles, their everyday implementation of their beliefs, under the pressure of the system’s way of life. I have also seen too many people earning $12-25,000 a year and a whole lot of “prestige” while “struggling” to change the system from “behind the lines.”
It is much too easy to lose sight of the line that I am supposed to be fighting behind and also lose the adversary relationship to the system which helps define us as God’s people, at one with him (John 17). I have also seen what this system does to people. I have seen the sickness in the faces of white people who have to hurt to prove their human superiority, and the welfare mentality in black people who have been exploited all their lives, and the drug addicts, and the nursing homes.
Basically it comes down to loyalty to a kingdom. If you want to save the system, work within it. If you want to save men from this system and get them into the kingdom, you had better reject inside change altogether. True change which is good and healthy cannot take place before true repentance. We are not to be the judges of the world, calling it on the basis of our knowledge of God to change, because it has not accepted our standard of judgment, it has not repented. We can only call it to repentance. But we are to be the judges, the vehicle of accountability, for our brothers and sisters in Christ, as outlined in 1 Corinthians 5. The subtle thought that this country and its institutions are Christian and simply in need of revival creeps in again and again to the conversations I have with people “working behind the lines.” We need to call Americans to the repentance of the cross and not to the perfection of a spiritual fruit from a tree that has not been rooted.
Now one thing I want to say here. I am not saying that Christians should not be representatives in congress and things like that. No. A person may be called by God into a position in the system. But the only agenda I could see that could make that calling worthy of someone’s energy is not reform, but prophecy, and that the position was a unique platform from which to preach the gospel. We need more people like Daniel who have their roots in a kingdom outside the system and whose lifestyles will not be molded -- a person in that kind of position needs more than most to be subject to a body of believers where discipline and accountability are real.
The alternative to working in the system is creating a model outside the system. Now, to me, the way to real change is through a group of people who have been “crucified with Christ,” so that he can live in them to set up an alternative model. With us God is trying to get together a model of the way to work in the black rural community. A model has power. It can be communicated because it can be seen. It can break institutional cycles of poverty and exploitation by being a corporate power itself, people presenting their many different bodies as one single living sacrifice. That’s power.
We have broken down all sorts of barriers in Mendenhall because we decided that we, as poor, ignorant, black folks were going to get some health care. People see the dedication we have to each other. White people see that they too can get better, more compassionate health care from us than anywhere else in town and wonder why. Even the town druggist, past secretary of the KKK, has yielded to treat black folks with respect, though that is probably more from economic reasons than anything else.
I guess, in the end, it’s a matter of trust. Do I trust God to produce the kind of system and model that he promises is like the kingdom, or do I trust the system to become something it has never been.
How can white people be involved in working in the black community?
White people have been involved ever since Voice of Calvary was founded. White Christians have given money necessary for ministry, have come themselves and helped in construction or evangelism or in management. We have full-time white people working on our staff. Churches have become a part of the ministry by making us part of their budget and by sending work/study groups down in the summer.
But I think the main thing that our white supporters have been able to do that so many white people have refused to do with us and other black groups is to accept black leadership, that black people might be able to minister to their people better than white people can. This is so basic, but so hard because white racism and superiority and black oppression and inferiority are so deep.
I remember back in the 1960s when the black manifesto was presented demanding reparations from the white community for back wages during years of enslavement. Do you see what you are doing as a means of implementing the idea of reparations in a creative way?
Yes, I do. We have friends, white supporters, who have backed us sacrificially along with our black supporters since we started in 1960. To see our work succeed, they have gone beyond what you call “reparations.”
But most people rebel against the concept of reparations. White people who don’t understand the depths of racism in terms of ownership don’t realize that they feel like they own the country and their futures. Many feel subconsciously they own black people and so have a hard time feeling any debt to them. People who are a little more liberal want to say that blacks and whites are “the same; after all, we’re all human.” Well, that’s okay to a point, but the problem is that these whites, when they say blacks are the same also assume that blacks have had the same opportunities, the same equality that they themselves have been guaranteed, and in doing this they neglect any difference in background and culture and deny any responsibility for the sins committed against the bodies and minds of black people in this country.
When most people give, they want to feel like it’s Christmas. They want to have the joy of giving and still enjoy the privileges of being white and the warm living room comforts of this society. Folks never want to think that there might be something wrong with the system which gave them their wealth.
People would rather give millions as charity than a dime as reparations. They are afraid that to give even a penny of their money as reparations might acknowledge that the rest of their money is blood money or guilt money, and that there is something basically wrong with the way they came by it.
To me, reparations is basically Christian. I would never force anyone to give reparations. Jesus got reparations from Zacchaeus, and then some. But not by force or demand, but by making Zacchaeus aware of his own past, giving him the opportunity to break with it, and the joyful hope of a new life with Him. This freed Zacchaeus up to search for opportunities to first atone and also to give.
Charity can never perform this role in society. It may too easily become cheap grace, gift and reward rolled into one act. It might be possible that reparations may be the tool through which many of our white brothers and sisters can creatively express their awareness of the very basic mistakes made since the founding of the country, mistakes like slavery, that have never been dealt with adequately by the church. Reparations shouts “yes” with courage to the charges of guilt, but then moves quickly and powerfully to deal with the problems.
I’ll never forget the words of Paul in Romans where he describes himself as a debtor. And I’ll never forget the fact that a few brothers and sisters, some of them white, have joined with us by going beyond reparations to see Voice of Calvary work.
After living through and being active as a Christian in the struggle for equal rights, do you see another movement developing today?
So many of the students I speak to on college campuses wish deep in their hearts that they could have participated in the civil rights movement and are regretful. But to me, I would rather stand at no other place in history than right now. We stand together at a very unique place in history. There is among evangelicals a belated but genuine social concern. There are people moving toward developing communities, not just for themselves, but for organizing their resources around areas of need. With these two trends, I really believe that we are quickly moving to a position where we can begin to really preach the gospel.
The test will be to see if these trends are more than a movement. The civil rights movement died right on the brink of some real human development. If we as Christians can see the issues of our day,, the poverty, racism, war, and if we can use the skills that we get from our training at school or on the job, and if we can really be open to being equipped by the Spirit of God, then we will be used. We must lie on our beds at night and wrestle with how we can individually and collectively bring our faith from talk to power, how we can bring our faith to bear on the real issues of human need.
Perkins was originally interviewed for The Other Side by H. Spees of the Voice of Calvary. This interview appeared in the May issue of The Other Side, and we appreciate John Alexander, editor of The Other Side and H. Spees for making it available for maximum exposure.
When this article appeared, John Perkins was director of the Voice of Calvary in Mendenhall, Mississippi.
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