#27: Where the Gospel Meets Dr. John M. Perkins

#27: Where the Gospel Meets Dr. John M. Perkins

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so do you know why we are in the studio today? 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: We are in the studio to talk about the Dr. John Perkins.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so we’re gonna talk about Dr. John M. Perkins. Uh, but before we actually dig into his story, I actually wanna start somewhere else.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Okay.

JESSE EUBANKS: I wanna start with this guy named Greg Fromholz. So this guy Greg, he’s a videographer. He’s mostly worked on music videos for artists like Rend Collective, Andrew Peterson, John Mark McMillan.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Okay, so what does he have to do with John Perkins?

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay so one day Greg decided that he wanted to break out of doing just music videos and get into documentaries, and his idea was to make films about well-known Christian figures today, to sort of pull back the curtain, figure out who they were when they weren’t writing books, when they weren’t speaking onstage, but he wasn’t sure where to start. So one day while he was filming he asked a guy that he was working with what he thought.

GREG FROMHOLZ: I said to him, ‘Look, just give me one name. If you could film anybody’s story right now, who would it be?’ He just, he didn’t flinch, he just went ‘John Perkins. It’s gotta be John.’ And I said, ‘Why? Who’s John Perkins?’

JESSE EUBANKS: So it wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. Y’know, Greg wanted to highlight well-known Christian figures. Y’know, he’d never even heard of John Perkins before. So Greg decides to find out — who is this guy? So he grabs a couple of John Perkins’ books.

GREG FROMHOLZ: I started reading his first book, which is Let Justice Roll Down, and then his kinda more popular book, which is called Dream With Me. And once I started reading those, I was like, ‘My goodness, why is this story not known beyond certain circles?’ 

JESSE EUBANKS: So Greg actually decided the same thing that we decided, which is people need to know John Perkins’ story because Dr. Perkins’ story — is amazing.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And I’m Jamaal Williams. Every episode we hear stories of social justice and Christian community.

JESSE EUBANKS: Today’s episode is where the gospel meets Dr. John M. Perkins. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And some people out there may be thinking ‘Who in the world is John Perkins?’ Or some people know who John Perkins is, but they don’t realize how incredible his life story is. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And so today we’re gonna dive into the life and legacy of Dr. John M. Perkins. Who is he? What is his story? And why is he a voice that we should be listening to today? Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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JESSE EUBANKS: So Jamaal, you’ve been really into the word grit recently.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: I have been. Yeah, grit is when passion and perseverance meet. And John Perkins is the godfather of grit.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, it feels like you would look up grit in the dictionary and just be like a photo of Dr. Perkins like right next to it. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Absolutely. I can’t think of anyone who has had more of an impact on ethnic reconciliation in the modern day than Dr. Perkins. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, like a big theme of his life has been to love God and to love the people around him.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Which of course is the way that God has called his people to live from the very beginning, but unfortunately we haven’t always done that so well.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, many times in the Bible, there were prophets who warned God’s people of his coming judgment, and one of those was the prophet Amos. God’s people had remained disobedient, and now Amos was prophesying the judgment that they would face if they didn’t repent. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: But what’s interesting is the aspect of their disobedience that made God the most upset. And in Amos chapter five, God says this — “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen. But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So the people’s disobedience wasn’t with the law. They were keeping all their duties — offering sacrifices, keeping appointed festivals. Instead their disobedience was actually societal.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah man, there was just no righteousness or justice. They were cheating people. They were robbing them. They had unjust scales and taking advantage of people, and God was fed up with it man. He was disgusted. 

JESSE EUBANKS: And part of that mistreatment was economic in nature, which actually that brings us to the beginning of Dr. Perkins’ story, because when Dr. Perkins was born, he was born into a world of economic extortion.

JOHN PERKINS: I grew up in an extended family. My grandmother, who had been the mother of 19 children…

JESSE EUBANKS: So that’s Dr. Perkins. He’s actually 89 years old now, and this is from an interview that he did with The Holy Post podcast. 

JOHN PERKINS: We came from bootleggers and gamblers and sharecroppers.

JESSE EUBANKS: So Dr. Perkins was born in 1930 in a sharecropping house in Mississippi.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah, a lot of people don’t know about sharecropping and just how evil it was. Some people consider it to be a second version of slavery. White landowners would give them equipment, they would put them to work, and they would create a system in which no matter how hard they worked they could never really work off their debt. It was a way to entrap African Americans.

JESSE EUBANKS: And because of sharecropping, Dr. Perkins actually quit school around 12 years old. He had the equivalent of a third grade education. And while, growing up, Dr. Perkins slowly began to understand the economic injustice around him, at first he didn’t really understand that it actually had to do with the color of his skin. Y’know, as a boy, he would play with the white landowner’s children, and in his mind, he thought they were all equal. It wasn’t until he was 16 that he came to realize the full reality of what it meant to be black in Jim Crow America. 

So Dr. Perkins when he was a kid, he had four siblings. And one of those siblings was an older brother named Clyde, and Clyde was actually a soldier who fought for the U.S. Army in World War II. Eventually the war ends and Clyde comes back to Mississippi and he’s a war hero. But even though he had faithfully served his country, there were some in his hometown who could only see the color of his skin. And it was a color that they did not like. And so one night, Clyde is outside a theater with his girlfriend and they were waiting in line to buy tickets. And as more and more people joined, the crowd started getting louder and louder. Eventually the deputy marshal came by, and Clyde was actually blamed for causing the ruckus and the marshal responded by hitting him with a club. And when Clyde made a move to fight back and protect himself, the marshal actually pulled out a gun and fired. And hours later in the hospital, Clyde was dead. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And that is tragic and what’s sad about it is he makes it from the war but is killed at the hands of a citizen whose freedom he was fighting for. Um, that really has to shape you. Um, it’s either going to shape you in a positive way or a negative way or possibly both. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Well, and what Dr. Perkins did learn from this was that Mississippi was not a safe place to be if you were black. So he and the rest of his family — they got out of there.

JOHN PERKINS: I ended up — after my brother was killed in a racial incident in Mississippi after World War II — I ended up in California.

JESSE EUBANKS: And once Dr. Perkins moved to California, he got a good paying job, started making some money. But he also saw that whites called the shots because they owned the resources. And if he could become as rich as they were, maybe he could actually beat the white man at his own game.

JOHN PERKINS: See, I understood the capitalistic economic system.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah, so Perkins starts thinking in terms of economics and economic fairness, even before he was a Christian. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I think naturally, the guy was sort of an economist. Y’know, he thought of things in terms of money and how things work economically. Y’know, there was just one problem with his plan though, and that was that while he was in California, John Perkins encountered somebody that he did not anticipate. He encountered God.

JOHN PERKINS: I’m not much of a religious person. I thought God was in the lake of fire with a pitchfork keeping people like me out.

JESSE EUBANKS: Well Dr. Perkins ended up getting married, he ended up starting a family. And then one day, his oldest son starts going to what he called a Good News club, sort of the equivalent of like a Vacation Bible School.

JOHN PERKINS: My son went there, and I began to watch him. He would come back so happy and that church got him to come to Sunday School, so my wife and I would fix him up. We were trying to climb the ladder of success, so she’d fix him up, buy him little clothes, and he came back singing a little song — ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red, brown, and yellow, black and white. They all are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.’ They didn’t sing that song in Mississippi where I came from.

JESSE EUBANKS: I mean all of this was brand new to Dr. Perkins. No one he knew in Mississippi sang that song. What did it mean that God loved all the children? Uh well, Dr. Perkins, he wanted to know more. And so he got a Bible, and he started going to Sunday School.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And what God used to speak to him was perfect. He heard a sermon from Romans chapter 6 — ‘the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.’ And Dr. Perkins writes this in his book Let Justice Roll Down. He says, ‘Wages. Yes, I knew about wages. Wages were a dime and a buffalo nickel. Wages were what I got as a young boy when I was old enough to work hard but still young enough that a white employer might still excuse himself from paying his black laborer a decent wage. Yes, I sure did know about wages. But wages of sin? My sin?’

JESSE EUBANKS: So between his son coming home and singing back this good news and this sermon that he’s hearing, Dr. Perkins realizes that he needs to respond to this God who keeps reaching out to him.  And so less than three months from when he first heard about his good news from this boy, Dr. Perkins gives his life to the Lord. 

So now that he was a Christian, Dr. Perkins wanted to tell other people his story and how they could become a Christian too. So he taught and spoke like any chance that he could get. And after hearing his story, some white men who did prison ministry, they asked John if he would come with them into the prison and share his testimony with the inmates. Here’s Dr. Perkins from an interview that we did with him. And just a heads up for our listeners, this was on the phone so the audio quality wasn’t exactly the best.

JOHN PERKINS: In California, you talk about that time, 4, 5, 6 percent of the population is black. But in the prison, I would say at least 50%. This was the first time I’d ever done a talk in a prison.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so Dr. Perkins is there at the prison. He begins sharing his story. And while the goal was to hopefully see the prisoners’ lives changed — it was actually Perkins’ own life that would end up being changed.

JOHN PERKINS: When I got through telling my story about how I met Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and how I gave my life to him, two young men in the back just start shaking and crying.

JESSE EUBANKS: So it was like these two young inmates just seemed so deeply moved by what Dr. Perkins has shared. 

JOHN PERKINS: I didn’t know what was going on, and when I got back there and started talking to them, they said ‘your life reflects our life.’ They had come from Mississippi like I had come.

JESSE EUBANKS: So it turns out these two guys were from Mississippi. And hearing the mention of his home state, it was like a splash of cold water in his face because Dr. Perkins had tried really hard to forget Mississippi. He thought it was too full of racial hate, too full of violence, and he didn’t wanna be a part of that anymore. And in fact, when he had first moved to California, he swore Mississippi was a place that he would never return to. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And he receives this call and he knows that he’s supposed to go back home to his hometown of Mississippi to spread the good news that that just rocked his world. And it was in the background as if that song that he had heard was playing, that God loves all the children of the world. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so after talking about it with his wife and with a whole bunch of deliberation, in the summer of 1960, Dr. Perkins and his family do what he thought they would never do — they packed up and they moved back to Mississippi, the very same town where his brother had been shot and killed. And what would he face now that he was back? 

DOPLHUS WEARY: Members of the Ku Klux Klan threatened to bomb his house. ‘Pray for brother John because they’re gonna kill him.’

JESSE EUBANKS: We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And I’m Jamaal Williams. And today’s episode is where the gospel meets Dr. John Perkins.

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so after becoming a Christian and sharing his testimony in prison, Dr. Perkins and his family felt the call to go back to Mississippi, the place they said they would never return to. But in obedience, they move back to Mississippi. But what was he supposed to do now that he was there? Well, one of the first things that he does is that he started to teach Bible studies in the neighborhood as a way to reach the young people in the community. And one of the people at these Bible studies was a high schooler named Dolphus Weary.

DOLPHUS WEARY: I became a Christian under his ministry in 1964. He did Bible studies on Tuesday nights, Thursday nights, and then he had a youth meeting on Saturday night. And I got to go to, to all of those and just really became a part of his vision to reach young people in the community.

JESSE EUBANKS: The community was this little town called Mendenhall. And just like when Jesus would, y’know, visit towns and people were amazed because they had never seen anyone like him before, Dolphus says actually they had never seen anyone like Dr. Perkins before. 

DOLPHUS WEARY: Growing up in rural Mississippi, going to church in rural Mississippi, the pastor lived 50 to a hundred miles away from the community. He would drive in one Sunday a month, preach, and then go back, and we won’t see him for another month.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah, that’s what they call circuit preaching. Back in the day, there wasn’t as many ordained pastors, so communities would share pastors and sometimes pastors would have to travel from far away and preach at two, three churches regularly.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and then along comes Dr. Perkins. Y’know, and he became one of the first preachers to actually live in the community where he taught. 

DOLPHUS WEARY: I’ve never seen a preacher with coveralls on, got a hammer and nails, and going over and helping somebody fix their porch. Or to see him sitting on the porch in a rocking chair talking to a guy in the community. That became a good model for us, to try to build relationships with people in the community.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what Dr. Perkins is doing here, he actually later on in life, he actually went on to formalize what he referred to as the three R’s, and he believes that those are the foundations for Christians developing community. And so what Dolphus just described is actually an example of the first R, and the first R stands for Relocation. And relocation — it’s actually pretty literal. Uh, I’m gonna move from where I am and live among those that I’m serving. This is actually something that we practice here at Love Thy Neighborhood, so young adults relocate to inner-city Louisville and they do life alongside their neighbors. And we got this concept from Dr. Perkins. 

But here’s what’s crazy, like this relocating and community work, it actually wasn’t going to come without opposition. Because I mean let’s not forget — this is Mississippi in the 1960’s, and the Civil Rights Movement, it was in full swing. 

AUDIO CLIP

JESSE EUBANKS: So here’s Dr. Perkins, it’s the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, everywhere he looks he sees people that look like him being oppressed and denied privileges in his community, and Dr. Perkins had to ask himself — this Christian faith that I have, does it only offer a personal message? Is it only about my personal salvation — or does it offer a public one too? 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Mm, that’ll preach. And for Dr. Perkins — the answer was both. So along with the Bible studies he was doing, he also became actively involved in voting rights. He attended rallies and political meetings. And here’s another quote from his book Let Justice Roll Down. Perkins writes — ‘I knew of course that we wouldn’t get anywhere unless we started with the gospel that calls men to Christ for forgiveness… for man cannot create justice by human manipulation alone. But at the same time, the Church, by so-called spiritual manipulation alone, cannot effect justice.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, but not everyone in the church agreed with his public stance.  I mean here’s another quote from that same book. So Perkins says — ‘Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and to Jesus an either/or proposition.’

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah, and it’s amazing to me that this is the same conversation we’re having — what, 60 years later — today. I mean it’s literally like we’re back in the 1960’s. People are arguing that it’s either/or, and clearly it’s both/and. And if we swap out the words “civil rights” and “social justice,” we’re having the same exact conversation.

JESSE EUBANKS: But the disapproval of some evangelicals wasn’t the only opposition he faced. Again, here’s Dolphus Weary remembering that time.

DOLPHUS WEARY: Members of the Klu Klux Klan were driving through his community, threatening to bomb his house, threatening to do something to his children, threatening to come down and shoot up all in his house. Those threats kept coming to him.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And this is where grit kicks in. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean this is really a moment where you have a big decision that you’ve gotta make. And Dr. Perkins made that choice. I mean he decided that he was just gonna keep on doing the work. If you remember, he had this fascination with economics, and now his faith informed how he looked at economics. And Dr. Perkins looked around and saw that the black people in his community were not being treated fairly by the local businesses.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Right. Either the businesses refused to hire blacks or blacks that were hired were grossly underpaid. 

JESSE EUBANKS: So, in February of 1970, Dr. Perkins helped organize a strike against the town’s businesses, but it turns out the strike would end up bringing some of his greatest opposition of all.

So one evening, after one of their strike demonstrations in town, a group of students participating in the strike piled in a van to head home. Then this van, he starts getting followed by a police car. The blue lights come on, signaling the van to pull over. And it was later testified in court that the patrolman, who was white, told the driver of the van quote ‘we’re not gonna take anymore of this civil rights stuff.’ So in the end, all the students actually ended up being arrested and taken to jail. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: So of course when Dr. Perkins hears about what happened to the students, he goes down to the jail to try to get the students out. But what ended up happening was that they were thrown in jail themselves.

JESSE EUBANKS: So then five deputy sheriffs and up to a dozen highway patrolmen came to the jail. All of them were white, and they started abusing everybody that’s in the jail. They began punching Dr. Perkins until finally he ended up on the ground, and then when he was on the ground, they actually didn’t stop. They began kicking him and continued to beat him to the point that he was in and out of consciousness, and they would just not relent. Again, here’s Dr. Perkins on The Holy Post podcast remembering that moment.

JOHN PERKINS: Boy, in the midst of my pain, when I was beaten I thought they was gonna kill me. And I thought about what could I have that could save me in here and I thought about it and I said ‘Boy if I had an atomic grenade, I’d pull the plug and I would —’ I said ‘I’d blow this place up.’ There was 19 black students in there with me on my side. I think there was two white kids on my side, and here was all of these evil white policemen. All of them was evil. All of them was white.

JESSE EUBANKS: Eventually the news of what was happening at the jail reached Mrs. Perkins. And once she heard what was happening, she called everyone she knew, urging them to pray, including Dolphus.

DOLPHUS WEARY: I received a phone call from Mrs. Perkins. She said, ‘Dolphus, get some of those kids together and pray for brother John because they’re gonna kill him.’

JESSE EUBANKS: But what’s incredible is in that jail cell, half conscious, on the brink of death and wishing he had a grenade, Dr. Perkins actually felt a conviction.

JOHN PERKINS: And I thought, ‘My reaction is worse than their action. My solution was evil. I was thinking evil. I was thinking almost like the people before the flood, that my real imagination was evil.

JESSE EUBANKS: And the reason that Dr. Perkins was saying that he was evil is because in that moment he was willing to do an eye for an eye. He wished he would have had a grenade, and if he did he would have killed them all just to get revenge. And he would have felt justified in doing it. 

JOHN PERKINS: Then I thought of the gospel. I said, ‘God, if you let me out of this jail tonight alive, I wanna preach the gospel that can save both of us evil people.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So eventually Dr. Perkins was released the next afternoon. So the injuries he sustained from the beating in the jail were significant. He ended up hospitalized right at the time he was supposed to officiate Dolphus’ wedding.

DOLPHUS WEARY: He was scheduled to do the wedding for me and my wife, but because he got beat so bad, one of the things he had, they had to do was to remove like one third of his stomach. So he was in the hospital at the time that he was supposed to do our wedding, and so he didn’t get a chance to do that.

JESSE EUBANKS: So laying in his hospital bed, Dr. Perkins had a lot of time to think. And he remembered his bargain with God — that if he got out of jail, he would preach the gospel of reconciliation for blacks and whites. 

JOHN PERKINS: I didn’t wanna do it. I really wanted to hold it as a victim. That’s the way we think. ‘I didn’t do it to you, you did it all to me.’ ‘I don’t think evil, you do.’ And then God wouldn’t let me have peace.

JESSE EUBANKS: God wasn’t gonna allow Dr. Perkins to sit in his bitterness, and it just so happened that some of the doctors who took care of him were white. I asked Dr. Perkins about the time that he spent in the hospital. Here’s part of that conversation.

JOHN PERKINS: One of the doctors that worked on me, two of the doctors that worked on me, one was a white nurse and one was a white man from Australia. They began to wash my wounds. It’s powerful. That’s a New Testament story. Paul was on his way to jail with Cornelius, and the Roman Philippian, that Roman jailer, beat them to a pulp.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: The story that he’s referring to is from Acts 16, the story of Paul and Silas. Paul and Silas were flogged and thrown into prison and a great earthquake loosened all the doors and the chains and the jailer thought that they had all escaped.

JOHN PERKINS: ‘Don’t do yourself any harm, we are all here.’ Then he cried out saying, ‘What must I do to be saved?’ They said, ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.’ And he got a lantern and a bowl and some buckets and went down there and washed the people’s wounds. That’s what reconciliation is about. It’s not just this cheap talk. It cost Paul something to open the doors of the church and to plant that church in Philippi. It cost Paul something when he went to Ephesus and those place and preach the gospel. It cost him something.

JESSE EUBANKS: So earlier I talked about the three R’s that Dr. Perkins developed, and the first of those three R’s was relocation. And the second of those three R’s is Reconciliation. So as Christians, we believe that the gospel of Christ reconciles us across all ethnic, cultural, social barriers, but that reconciliation came by way of the cross. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And this is a word that we need for today, that we are working from reconciliation because of what Christ has done for us on the cross. But it’s not easy. It’s gonna require grit. It’s gonna require forgiveness. It’s gonna require being open.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, you and I are friends. We talk a lot about cross-cultural friendships, multi-ethnic friendships, and one of the things that you and I have talked about is that we live in a time where it’s like people can’t be friends across different ethnicities because, y’know, the other person says something they shouldn’t say, they do something they shouldn’t have done, and instead of taking a posture of — ‘Hey, I wanna come to my friend and let’s talk about this and let’s move forward together’ — the other person takes a posture of offense, like ‘You’re not a safe person anymore, I can’t be around you.’ And it just feels like that is not the way forward. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Yeah it’s not. Reconciliation requires grace. It’s what Paul did with Peter in Galatians 2. We confront the other person. We don’t necessarily let them off, but we extend grace and let them know that we forgive ‘em because we need the same grace.

JOHN PERKINS: So you gotta find that space where you can see suffering as virtuous too.

JESSE EUBANKS: So eventually Dr. Perkins was released from the hospital. But even though it almost cost him his life, he actually still insisted on working toward reconciliation and community development. So after he had fully recovered, Dr. Perkins actually turned a lot of his local ministry over to Dolphus Weary so that he could focus more on traveling and speaking. He saw that the church needed somebody to be speaking into how black folks and white folks could continue towards reconciliation, and he wanted to share his three R’s with the world. We’re gonna talk about the third R in just a second. How can we best love our impoverished communities in ways that would reflect the gospel of Jesus? And so Dr. Perkins actually ended up becoming a really sought-after speaker and kind of a go-to man for Christians that wanted to engage their communities. 

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: In fact, Dr. Perkins would go on to help start the Christian Community Development Association, also known as the CCDA. And this organization trains and equips people to do the same type of work that he has done, except now it’s happening all over the world.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, and CCDA, you go to their conferences and it was just like thousands and thousands of people at these things. You know, and over the years, Dr. Perkins’ life, it started to have a ripple effect, reaching even in the most unlikely places.

RUSSELL MOORE: …Very young guy, but he’s a nationally known Christian hip hop artist. And he said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s John Perkins.’

JESSE EUBANKS: Up next — how the legacy of John Perkins includes hip hop and robots. Stay with us.

COMMERCIAL 

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And I’m Jamaal Williams. Today — where the gospel meets Dr. John Perkins. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Okay, so now that we’ve heard a little bit of his story, I wanna talk about his legacy and about how Dr. Perkins has influenced people that he’s never even met before. So I asked Dolphus Weary what impact he’s seen in his community since taking over the ministry from Dr. Perkins, and he told me this story about how robotics have influenced young adults in rural Mississippi. 

DOLPHUS WEARY: ‘Can you teach our kids about robotics?’ And in 2011, they started a robotics program in this small rural town and they put together a team and they went to Ole Miss for a statewide competition and they won the statewide competition.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: What Dolphus Weary is talking about here is an example of Dr. Perkins’ third R. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, totally. So remember the first two were Relocation and Reconciliation. The last R stands for Redistribution. So Christ calls us to share with those in need. And this can mean through money, but it can also mean through our other resources — like our skills or knowledge or social connections. So Dolphus decides to redistribute, y’know, his ideas, his education, his influence, into these kids’ lives. And in fact, their victory at the statewide competition led these kids to actually go on to nationals. 

DOLPHUS WEARY: They started seeing their name flash in eighth place, in ninth place, in tenth place. They finally came away in 15th place in the nation in the world. These kids, two of them now are getting ready to graduate from Ole Miss with engineering degrees. From rural Mississippi. Nobody had ever recruited people from rural Mississippi because there’s no way to determine whether or not they have an interest in this area.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: It’s amazing how, once again, God is defying people’s expectations and showing us that there’s no such thing as superior people, right? Or superior race. It really comes down to superior opportunities.  

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, I mean you back up and you think about it, like these two kids were influenced by Dr. Perkins. I mean Dr. Perkins and his three R’s — he passes that on to Dolphus, Dolphus takes those three R’s, and he implements it, and eventually like it leads to two of these kids graduating from Ole Miss. 

DOLPHUS WEARY: So now a number of our ministries have robotic programs, and we know that this is turning on more and more young people to wanna do something and these two kids who are gonna be graduating next year are gonna be a good model for other kids to look at to see what they wanna do.

JESSE EUBANKS: And that’s just some of the influence that he’s had in the state of Mississippi, but his influence reaches far beyond that. Dr. Perkins’ wisdom and experience has shaped many of our current Christian leaders. One of those is actually Dr. Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Dr. Moore has had a huge impact on my life. Now I consider him to be a dear brother.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so I actually called Dr. Moore on the phone to ask him about his own relationship with John Perkins.

RUSSELL MOORE: Shortly after I was elected to the position that I hold now, John Perkins was somebody I heard from right away, who said, ‘I have some words of encouragement for you.’ And there were things that — at the time, I wished that I had recorded the whole conversation and had it transcribed to remember it because that would then happen every conversation that I’ve had with John Perkins. I talk to John Perkins all the time. Every conversation is like that.

JESSE EUBANKS: Yeah, so Russ Moore’s right. I mean Dr. Perkins just like exudes wisdom. Like when he speaks, like you just wanna record everything. And in fact, Dr. Moore has had the opportunity to speak alongside Dr. Perkins on numerous occasions. And he continues to be surprised by the extent of Dr. Perkins’ influence. So for example, okay, so there was this one time that they were at a conference together and they were dialoguing about racial reconciliation, but then this thing happens that starts to make Russell Moore pretty nervous. 

RUSSELL MOORE: We did a summit on racial reconciliation and John Perkins and I did a conversation together there and he started criticizing Christian hip hop just in an aside and I could look out from the platform and see we had many Christian hip hop artists there, some of them speaking. And I was thinking, ‘Well, how am I going to clean this up?’

JESSE EUBANKS: So like I have no idea what Dr. Perkins said exactly, but it was enough that Dr. Moore was really nervous. And so, so they finish the conversation onstage and Dr Moore immediately, he goes out into the crowd in order to try to do some damage control.

RUSSELL MOORE: And I went up to one of them, very young guy, but he’s a nationally known Christian hip hop artist, and I said, y’know, ‘I’m really sorry that that happened.’ And he said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s John Perkins. He can say whatever he wants to and I’ll just take notes and receive it.’

JESSE EUBANKS: So like Dr. Perkins just has garnered like so much respect from people, y’know, that this hip hop artist couldn’t even conceive being offended by what he had to say, even though Dr. Perkins was critiquing his own music industry. 

RUSSELL MOORE: There’s such a sense of admiration and goodwill toward him.

JESSE EUBANKS: And another person that he influenced is even Greg Fromholz, y’know, the filmmaker from the very beginning of the episode. So Greg Fromholz eventually did get to make a documentary about Dr. Perkins and his family. And even Greg said that the five days that he spent filming with Dr. Perkins, it changed him.

GREG FROMHOLZ: For me, it was his relentless pursuit of justice and his desire, from my perspective, to never ever give up until — well, just to never give up actually. But he always went back to justice. He always went back to love. He always went back to his faith. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t change my life.

JESSE EUBANKS: Greg says that spending time with Dr. Perkins has made him see the importance of working towards racial reconciliation and diversity, but also that a life full of love and justice and, y’know as you say, gritty discipleship to Jesus — it may not be as far out of reach as we think.

GREG FROMHOLZ: After filming, we were at the prison where he had been tortured and, you know, he talked about that standing outside the prison for the first time. And we then finish that interview and I said to him, I said, ‘John, would you like to do anything?’ He’s like, ‘Let’s go for ice cream.’ (laughs) And so we went to Dairy Queen and sat outside having ice creams. And the reason why I loved it is ‘cuz it was just like ‘this is life.’ And so for me, the things I liked most about making these films is finding those moments where we’re walking through a garden and talking about vegetables or having an ice cream or whatever it may be ‘cuz you realize that this is an extraordinary human being that is also a very wonderful but simple and beautiful person that I could actually — I could do this. This is not so far away from my comfort zone that I can achieve what they’ve achieved.

JESSE EUBANKS: So along with his wife, Dr. Perkins has gone on to start his own foundation, the John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation. And it started off to aid programs in their community, but it’s actually gone on to support programs in a lot of different communities. They actually have a bunch of different national affiliates now. Uh, he’s served on the board of directors for 15 organizations, including World Vision and Prison Fellowship. And he’s actually served on the presidential task force for five U.S. presidents.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Dr. Perkins has been awarded many honorary doctorates. I mean he’s gotten some doctorates from some really, really strong schools, dozens of ‘em, that all acknowledge his work. As well, he’s received Biola University’s Colson Conviction and Courage Award and the Kuyper Prize at Calvin University.

JESSE EUBANKS: Y’know, we asked each of the people we interviewed — if Dr. Perkins was in the room right now, what message would you have for him? What would you wanna say to him? And they actually all had the same response.

GREG FROMHOLZ: I think, for me, it would just be a quite simple ‘thank you.’

RUSSELL MOORE: What I would say to him, and I have said to him, is a word of thanks.

DOLPHUS WEARY: I would say thank you. Thank you for being a visionary leader that God has used to touch my life and touch lives of people throughout the country and throughout the world.

JESSE EUBANKS: And y’know, one of the things that Dr. Moore cites as a reason for this respect is that Dr. Perkins is constantly seeking the balance between truth and grace and between word and deed. 

RUSSELL MOORE: John Perkins was somebody who never split the Bible apart, so we’ll have some people who will emphasize gospel and reconciliation but in a way that minimizes repentance and Lordship and discipleship and justice. And then you’ll have some people who will talk about justice but who shy away from issues of gospel and of reconciliation. John Perkins did, and does, what the Old and New Testaments do, which is, uh, to speak of both justice and justification.

JESSE EUBANKS: And so we like, we live in this polarized time, right, where society is always trying to tell us ‘Pick your side, choose your team.’ And even in Christendom it’s true. It’s like you’ve got one side in Christendom that’s saying ‘you need to be about biblical truth, you need to be about preaching the word,’ and then you’ve got another side in Christendom that’s all about ‘Hey, we need to be about social action and influencing the culture and we need to be about deed. So which side are you on? Like choose your side.’ And what’s amazing is Dr. Perkins testifies to what we see in Scripture, which is that Jesus tells us ‘Don’t pick either of those. Pick both.’

JOHN PERKINS: That’s not God’s voice. That’s not God — ‘let justice roll down like water and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.’

JESSE EUBANKS: And so we want to follow Jesus, and we want to be people of both word and deed, of both biblical values and social action, because in Jesus we have the freedom to choose both.

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you’d like to learn more about the life and work of Dr. John M. Perkins, I cannot recommend his books enough. He’s written five books and co-authored so many more than that. His first memoir, Let Justice Roll Down, tells in even greater detail the moments from his life that we’ve highlighted in this episode. His latest book is called One Blood: Parting Words to the Church on Race and Love. For even more resources on Dr. Perkins or to hear past episodes of this podcast, visit our website at lovethyneighborhood.org/LTNpodcast.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Special thanks to our interviewees for this episode — Greg Fromholz, Dr. Dolphus Weary, Dr. Russell Moore, and of course Dr. John M. Perkins. Also special thanks to The Holy Post podcast for additional content for Dr. Perkins.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Our senior producer and host is Jesse Eubanks.

JESSE EUBANKS: Our co-host today is Dr. Jamaal Williams.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: And our producer, technical director, editor, and baby genius is Rachel Szabo. Additional editing by Resonate Recordings.

JESSE EUBANKS: Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Podington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX.

JAMAAL WILLIAMS: Apply for your social justice internship supported by Christian community by visiting lovethyneighborhood.org. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, ‘Go, and do likewise.’