Stories · Faith, justice and reconciliation

Love that did not give up on justice: John Perkins

7 min read, approximately

Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.Romans 12:21 (Goodness) · WEB

He had gone to help others

In 1970, several students were arrested after a protest against segregated businesses. According to Christianity Today’s historical account, John Perkins went to the Rankin County jail in Mississippi to help them. White officers brutally beat him there. He had arrived concerned for others and ended up needing help himself.

This story does not allow us to hide behind a comfortable word. It was not simply a difference of opinion or an argument that went wrong. Someone suffered violence from people with authority over his safety. Naming that harm belongs to the respect we owe him before discussing any reconciliation.

We will not add an imagined jail scene. The documented event is enough to raise the question running through these pages: how can someone continue believing in a love capable of transforming relationships when others have used power to humiliate him? We will not answer by placing a heroic sentence in his mouth.

The answer lies in a journey, not one perfect instant. Understanding it requires looking back at the life that brought him there. The assault was not his entire identity. Before it, there were a family, a faith and shared work that deserve to remain at the center of the account.

News that came through a son

John M. Perkins’s timeline dates his conversion to 1957 and recalls his son Spencer returning from a Bible activity with a song about Jesus’ love for children. In 1960, Perkins returned to Mendenhall, Mississippi, to share the gospel. Faith had begun to shape his decisions.

The detail about his son briefly reverses the familiar direction of learning. The adult is not always the one opening a door for the child. Sometimes news heard within a family makes an older person reconsider what they thought they knew. Christian good news does not always need to enter through a solemn public setting.

Speaking of Jesus’ love for everyone sounds simple until that claim enters a society distributing dignity unequally. Then it becomes more than a comforting idea. It asks who may sit beside us, whom we listen to and which humiliations we have learned to tolerate.

In our reading, this is one demand of the gospel: refusing to let the word everyone remain without consequences. It does not authorize us to imagine that Perkins immediately resolved every wound. It helps us understand why proclaiming Christ could lead him toward other people’s suffering rather than away from it. Faith could become a reason to approach what was painful, without making that pain acceptable.

A ministry facing practical needs

The John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation describes their family’s return from California to Mendenhall and the development of childcare, adult education, health services and housing repairs. Vera Mae and their children participated in the work. This was not the isolated achievement of a single protagonist.

A community is not made only of ideas. It has schedules, homes, children needing attention and people trying to learn something after a difficult working day. When we speak of service, those realities prevent compassion from remaining abstract. Someone must listen, organize, collaborate and return when the first enthusiasm fades.

It is equally important to recognize the abilities of people receiving support. Poverty does not make a neighbor voiceless. That person brings knowledge, relationships and decisions of their own. Genuine help requires surrendering the comfort of presenting oneself as the only person who knows what is needed.

This part of the story prepares a decisive distinction: seeking justice is not only rejecting what destroys. It also means participating in what makes life possible. We are not counting programs as automatic proof of success or erasing their collaborators. We are considering an effort to give Christian words an everyday presence that can be seen and tested.

The hands that cared after the harm

The Gospel Coalition recounts Perkins’s memory of hospital recovery: Black and white doctors and nurses cared for him. He interpreted that care as helping heal his relationship with others as well. Recognizing those who assisted him did not make him call the violence he suffered just.

The difference between a hand that wounds and one that cares does not lie in a racial label. It lies in what someone does with the power they hold before another life. The care received offers an image of contrast without turning the hospital into a place where every consequence of trauma magically disappears.

For the Christian reader, this passage accompanies reflection on love becoming action. We do not present it as a statement Perkins made during his hospitalization:

My little children, let’s not love in word only, or with the tongue only, but in deed and truth.1 John 3:18 · WEB

Practical care does not require an injured person to smile in order to deserve it. Nor does it ask them to abandon the pursuit of justice. Our application is simple and demanding: kindness should not become a way of hurrying someone else’s grief. It should offer a presence that protects, listens and respects the time recovery requires.

Reconciliation needed a neighborhood

CCDA explains that the first components of its approach came from Perkins’s three Rs: relocation, reconciliation and redistribution. Its proposal connects relationship with Christ to working with neighbors and listening to communities. This is a philosophy of service, not certification of identical results in every setting.

We can pause over the word with. Working with somebody differs from designing their future without asking them. Proximity alone does not guarantee understanding, but distance combined with superiority often prevents it. Listening changes plans, reveals mistakes and restores people’s opportunity to participate in matters affecting them.

Reconciliation that leaves responsibilities untouched risks remaining a photograph. An embrace can be sincere and still be insufficient. If nobody subsequently changes behavior, shares resources or examines an unjust practice, beautiful words may leave intact the distance they were meant to overcome.

The account does not require us to adopt one program for every context. It invites us to ask what consequences follow from the love we profess. Can anyone recognize it in our decisions? Does it shape how we work, distribute opportunities and accept that other people must also have a say? Faith becomes visible in these small, persistent questions. They bring the language of care back within reach of ordinary choices.

Being welcomed as a brother

In a 2011 CCDA interview, Perkins recalled his discipleship in California between 1957 and 1959. He named Wayne Leitch and white believers who welcomed him as an equal brother. He located a root of his reconciling vocation there, before the violence he later suffered.

We return to the beginning without being imprisoned by it. The story does not end by granting an aggressor the right to define the whole life of the person assaulted. Nor does it need to deny the past to affirm that another relationship is possible. Forgetting a wound differs from refusing to build the future exclusively around it.

Not everyone must follow the same path or approach someone who harmed them. Keeping distance, reporting wrongdoing and seeking protection may be necessary decisions. The hope we find here is not an order for instant reconciliation. It is the testimony of a man who connected faith in Jesus with working toward a more just community.

Perhaps our next step is not founding an organization. It may be listening without becoming defensive, acknowledging responsibility or sustaining work that benefits others. Love does not lose strength by becoming concrete. It stops being only a word and begins offering what an injured life needs: truth, care and room to grow again.

May God continue to bless you, and may you have a wonderful day in Jesus Christ!
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