Written in honor of John Perkins and read at the June Envision 2008 conference during the first John M. Perkins Visionary Award Ceremony.

June 10, 2008

“JP.”; Or “Grandpa.” That’s what my wife Donna, our children, and I affectionately call him in the Rice family.

I met him nearly 30 years ago when I was a student, and he came to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont. Hearing his story for the first time—his journey from Mississippi sharecropping family, to civil rights struggles, to founding an interracial ministry in the heart of the South—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. I had just rolled out of bed and was bleary-eyed. It was February, it was freezing, and my car had no heat and a rust 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 two thousand—not two.

On that day in 1979, social justice was at the margins of evangelicalism in America. It isn’t anymore, and JP’s ministry of teaching and witnessing was 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 believer.

Two years after that airport drive I was in Jackson at JP’s Voice of Calvary ministry, volunteering for 6 months with no inkling that I would stay 17 years. That little inner-city zip code was a testing ground for Christianity. It was abandoned by the white church when black folks moved in. It was abandoned by the black church when black folks got prosperous. What JP said—what he’s kept saying all these years—is that Christians in America are captive to individualism, selfishness, and greed. The place of conversion is abandoned communities at the margins. That’s where we would learn a new kind of Christianity—locally, daily, intimately; eating, singing, and worshipping together; working, struggling and forgiving across deep divides like race and class. And because so many were so transformed within that zip code, scattering throughout America and the world, we learned that this small and daily vision is in fact a very, very big idea.

Yet what we must never forget is how easily none of this could have happened. JP’s son Spencer told me a part of the story JP doesn’t tell.

Many know about JP’s beating in 1970 by white state police, in a jail cell in Brandon Mississippi. What we don’t know, what Spencer told me, is how in the months after the beating—in the months after one of his children saw him in the hospital room and ran out saying “I hate white people, I will always hate white people”—during those long months, JP wrestled with God. Those days of spiritual pain matched his physical pain. Why bother? Why not give up on white folks? Why not just work with black folks and turn nationalist?

We easily forget how many do that, how many of those scarred by the struggle for justice end up bitter, angry, in despair. What Spencer took from his father’s agonizing yet liberating journey to forgiveness is that to be a Christian is a constant showdown between our shallow desires and God’s deeper vision of transformation, beauty, and joy.

And if JP is anything in the midst of all his activism, he is joyful. Just watch him bust into a fresh watermelon. He loves few things more than rehabbing a house, striding through the rooms and telling you his plans. We sent a young Duke Divinity student to live and work with JP three years ago. His first morning someone said JP wanted to see him, so he quickly changed into nice clothes and went outside. As soon as JP saw him he said, “Boy, get out of those clothes! We gonna build a fence today!”

A danger today is sexiness about social justice. Justice has become popular, even cool. But without his costly, local story of daily life and conversion there is no JP.

True peace disturbs “what is,” the “powers.” I just finished a book about a story I had never heard—President John F. Kennedy’s prophetic turn toward peace with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and his call for America to examine itself and its heart toward the enemy. This turning toward peace is why I believe JFK was killed. Individualism, selfishness, and greed don’t go down without a fight. We prefer justice without repentance. We want world peace without carrying a cross. We prefer a white church, a black church, a Latino church—not the church of Jesus Christ.

JP’s life—even the scars of that beating on his very body—call us to remember the wounds of Jesus’ own resurrected body, wounds which did not disappear. In JP’s body and story are both the signs of dying and the signs of resurrection. We cannot choose between the two. His life and his body demand our response.

God, I thank you for giving me—all of us—such a witness. For giving us this body, this life, that declare to us that the way things are is not the way things have to be. That in a divided world, something far better and more beautiful is possible. Because you gave us JP.