Declare His Glory in the Community (1976)

Urbana Classics
by John Perkins

As we rediscover the local body, we also rediscover that God wants to duplicate throughout all history that once-in-history manifestation of his love. He wants to put the same life and love of Jesus Christ in a church so that people can again see Christ.

I am thankful that there are thousands of us here this day gathered around our Lord Jesus Christ, coming to ask how he might live through us to declare his glory. This gives me a great sense of the beauty and the power of God's universal body of Christ. It is true, God walks among his worldwide church today. Our gathering together is just a token of the harvest already reaped across the earth, just a glimpse of how broad our body really is.

But I am most thankful because I believe for the first time in recent history, more of us than ever before are a part of, and are struggling to be, the body of Jesus Christ in our local setting. In our hometowns, on our campuses, in cities, rural areas, in the ghettos and in the suburbs, I believe more of us than ever before are wrestling with what it means to be feet and hands, arms and legs, eyes and ears to each other in the same location under the headship of Christ. For that reason I believe that we are in a unique position to proclaim God's glory in the community.

Called to Mississippi

In 1957 God first began to call me to declare his glory in the community. That was the year of my conversion. We were living in California at the time, and after coming to know Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I became involved in child evangelism, learning how to use flannelgraphs and Bible stories to reach young people with the good news. A group of us formed what we called the Fisherman's Gospel Crusade and began to witness to people in our city of Monrovia.

Then I began a ministry that was to change the direction of my life. A group of Christian businessmen asked me to go with them to speak to the young men in the juvenile detention camps that are located up in the San Bernadino Mountains of Southern California. I went and quickly began to see why my white Christian brothers had asked me to come. Here in the camps a high percentage of the prisoners were black. And as I shared Sunday after Sunday, and as kids came forward with tears in their eyes, the Lord began to burden me with the call to return to my home in Mississippi.

You see, I wasn't born in California. I was born in Mississippi. But I had left Mississippi in the forties after my brother was killed by our local policeman in a "racial incident." I came to California, never having heard the central truth of the gospel: that Jesus Christ can come and live out his life through a person and save that person. I had never heard that while I served in the army; it wasn't until 1957 that that message was made clear to me.

In the prison camps, the Lord showed me kids just like myself, many from the South. I could hear Mississippi and Alabama in their voices, and I knew that they were just like me, coming up without much education and without any understanding of or exposure to the gospel. They had come to the big city to make it, just like me. Somehow I had made it. They hadn't. They had stolen a car or something and ended up in jail.

What God was showing me was that maybe the problems among black people in the cities and in the ghettos were really the unsolved problems of the South. I thought of my people back home and the churches and the religion. One night I was preaching on the Apostle Paul. I was over in Romans 10 where Paul is talking about the great zeal and yet the great ignorance of his people, the Jews. I could say with Paul about my black people, "My heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved." God was telling me that, "I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened." This may be hard for you to believe, but the black community still represents one of the largest untouched mission fields in the world today. Only in the last few years has there been anybody committed to a comprehensive strategy of reaching blacks with the gospel.

So in 1960 God called us to move our family back home to Mississippi. This was a tough calling. We were comfortable in California. Both my wife and I had good jobs. We had just bought a big twelve-room house. We had five children. When we arrived home, the people were almost embarrassed to see us. They knew we were making it in California, but they also knew that their community had nothing to offer us. I had to work picking cotton the first couple years. It seemed like we had moved backwards.

But the Lord had work for us to do. He began to open doors to teach his Word in Sunday-school classes, in vacation Bible schools, and finally in the public schools-this was before integration. With our Child Evangelism materials we were eventually speaking to about 10,000 children each month.

It was a tough calling because of the conditions in and around Mendenhall - the physical, educational, economic poverty that trapped so many of our people. At this time the civil rights movement was just coming to Mississippi.

Before the movement, God taught us that real evangelism takes you to the point of standing face to face with the real needs of a person and then reaching out to help meet those needs. The need was so great for mothers to work that they would often pull older children out of school to watch the younger ones at home. We knew these kids needed to be in school; so we began a little day-care center and served lunch to the kids, some of whom were suffering from malnutrition. Soon we were asked to become the center for Headstart for Simpson County.

Working with the children opened the door to us and allowed us to see how sin worked itself out in the community, to see how economic self-interest coupled with racism could institutionalize itself and create a cycle of poverty and despair that trapped the lives of black people. There was spiritual poverty in our black community to be sure, but that spiritual poverty was heightened by the "niggerizing" dependence of the system; crises in housing, health care, nutrition, education, skills and economics were crippling the hearts and minds of black people. To proclaim God's glory in the community was to ask ourselves as Christians, How can we break this cycle of poverty? How can the love of God reach into the whole of a person's life and heal them?

I wish I could take you there. One lady, who became our friend, was Mrs. Hester Evans. Everyone calls her Miss Hester. From the outside, Miss Hester's place looks like an abandoned shack: Walls slant at different angles. Children come out as you drive up and stand on the broken steps. The roof is tattered and off center. The whole structure, much of it rotten, leans so much that when you walk close it seems like you're losing your balance. Inside there are four rooms. Every one but the kitchen has beds in it. Gaps in the walls and around the fireplace are stuffed with pieces of tin and rags. There are mice and rats. In the kitchen is a broken refrigerator, a sack of meal and a jar of jelly. About three months ago, behind a torn plastic curtain, one of Miss Hester's daughters lay whimpering on a bed. Corrine had gotten sick and was now so malnourished that it looked like her skin had been sewn tightly over her bones. She looked like a living skeleton. At 36 she appeared older than her mother, although she was once a beautiful black woman. She had bedsores.

One thing that is striking about Miss Hester is her spirit. Even having to raise kids and now grandkids in that condition, she never seems broken. In her living room hangs a plaque that reads, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and You Shall Be Saved."

But can I be happy with that? What does the Spirit of God in me say when I see such frighteningly limited salvation? What about Corrine? She is dead now. But what about the other children playing outside? And what about the children like them in shacks and housing projects all over this country? We desperately need to declare God's glory in the community.

After a few years Voice of Calvary (that is what we called our little mission) became involved in voter registration and integration, and started small business co-ops in the country. We marched, we prayed, we carried signs, we organized people to help themselves, we sang freedom songs. All of this was a result of asking the questions, How can God break the cycle of poverty through us? How can we declare his glory in our community?

As a result, some of us were thrown in jail. Some of us were beaten almost to death by Mississippi highway patrolmen and Rankin County sheriffs. And some of us have been called by God to go through that deep forgiveness process so that we wouldn't be crippled by the hatred that began to infect us too. God had to show us that he wanted us to love instead, to be reconciled and to be a reconciling force in the community. Since then God has called us to tutor, to educate adults, to build a health center and thrift store - to be the body of Christ in Mendenhall.

The New Testament Meaning of the Church

I believe that through the last sixteen years' struggle, God is doing something unique. I see it happening at Voice of Calvary, but also in a much larger movement in the church at large. I see God giving back to us an understanding of the local church as a means to declare his glory in the community.

I believe that God is doing something in our lifetime and especially in the last ten years: He is giving us the New Testament meaning of the church. It seems like the Holy Spirit is restoring to us an understanding of our local church as the replacement of Christ's body in a specific neighborhood, drawing people that they might be "nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments," growing with a "growth that is from God" (Col. 2:19).

I believe two things are happening as the worldwide church rediscovers the importance of the local body, and as we commit ourselves to being that replacement of Christ's physical body in our neighborhood and to carrying on the ministry he began 2,000 years ago.

First, I believe that God is showing us, again and afresh, the meaning of the gospel. This is something that has been lost in the evangelical church. The real meaning of the gospel has been clouded up with doctrine. You see, if you were to ask almost any evangelical in this country, "What is the gospel?" chances are he would say to you, "The gospel is the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ." And if he is really fundamental, he will add the Second Coming. Now I believe in all these things. These are the propositional facts of the gospel. But the gospel is more than that. The gospel is the manifestation of God's love in history, the making visible, the incarnation of God's love in time. The death of Jesus Christ on the cross was God's way of showing to the world in one act, at one point in history, that he loved us.

That act of love happened once and will never be repeated (Heb. 7:27). Yet God desires his love to be made manifest over time, throughout history. And this is precisely where the body of Christ comes in. As we rediscover the local body, we also rediscover that God wants to duplicate throughout all history that once-in-history manifestation of his love. He wants to put the same life and love of Jesus Christ in a church so that people can again see Christ.

This is what Jesus meant when he said that we are to let our light so shine before men that they may see our good works and glorify the Father. This is what he meant when he said, "I am the light of the world" (Jn. 8:12), and then turned to his disciples, and said, "You are the light of the world" (Mt. 5:14). He gives us the same high calling that he himself fulfilled when he lived and taught here on this planet. And God never gives us a call to be or do something without also providing the necessary resources.

This is the second thing that happens when we rediscover the importance of the local body of Christ: God is restoring to the local body the gifts of the Spirit. People in local bodies are dealing with each other in ways that hold them accountable to the high calling of replacing Jesus Christ's body on earth and we are beginning to recognize the gifts of the Spirit within them. This can happen only as we rediscover the local body. Because the gifts of the Spirit are not mentioned in terms of glorifying individuals - but usually in the context of the body (Rom.12;1 Cor.12). These gifts are not given to glorify persons individually, but to help build the body, to cause it to function as a powerful whole (Eph. 4:11-12).

The exciting aspect of this is that as people become the body in a local community, we can see Jesus walking the earth again, able to carry on the same ministries he carried on when he was here before as one person. Just as he said, "The Father who dwells in me does his works" (Jn. 14:10), so now the Son who dwells in us, Christ's new body, does his works.

This is one aspect of the promise: "Greater works than these will [you] do because I go to the Father" (Jn.14:12). Jesus meant that his body would be embodied in local fellowships, scattered throughout the world and that the multiplied effect of these bodies would produce a greater quantity of healing works. The body is God's strategy for declaring and multiplying his glory in communities throughout the earth.

I know it is relevant to the poor community because I have seen and lived among the damaged in our communities. I have seen the poverty and the racism and the ignorance of the gospel. And I know that it is only when God's glory is declared in local communities of need that real healing takes place. Scripture says that we are made "God's own people" in the community so that we can "declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Pet. 2:9). The promise is that God has chosen the church to make known his "manifold wisdom" not only to people but even "to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places" (Eph. 3:10). God wants to make known all the facets of his wisdom his justice, his compassion, his economics, his holiness, his authority and power. All of these will be made known as we become his body in the local community. This is what he has done in Mendenhall. And this vision has special relevance in any community where the needs are out of control.

This then is my hope. I see it in the growing number of sharing Christian communities, the small group movement, the church renewal movement and the heightened evangelical concern for social action. There is a good basis for hope that God's glory may be declared in the community in new and exciting ways through his body.

But there is also for me an element of despair. It is the despair I feel when I see the victims in our communities - victims of hunger and disease and oppression, victims of injustice and poor housing and welfare. It is the despair I feel when I see that the dynamic life of the body of Christ has not been brought to bear on the needs of poor people in this country. It is the despair I feel when I see that many times the church is apart of a system that afflicts the afflicted and comforts the comfortable rather than the other way around.

When I am told about the growing hunger problem in the world, I am not startled because I have seen the hungry grow retarded and the retarded live a life of misery and poverty right here in Mississippi.

When I am told that the world with its growing number of victims can at any time explode into a state where possibly all of us will be victims, I am not startled because I have seen too many people already victimized by a cycle of poverty which has manufactured brokenness since as long as I can remember.

When I am told that the fabric of life and culture as we know it is threatening to unravel, I am not startled because I have seen the tattered remnants of many lives already destroyed by the faceless power of oppression.

But what does startle me is the church and the lack of response by the people whom God has called to be the salt and the light in a decaying world of deepening darkness. It startles me when I look out and see that the only people equipped with the faith, the love and the values necessary to redirect life in our society and heal some of its many victims are without a comprehensive strategy. It startles me to see Christians more intent on getting their piece of the action than on saving people from being destroyed by poor health, poverty and an ignorance of the plan of salvation.

We need to make visible God's glory in the community!

The Three "Rs" of the Quiet Revolution

Failure to minister to the poor testifies to more than unfulfilled responsibility; it witnesses to a distorted view of the church.

There is, I believe, one key issue which, if addressed by the church today, would give power to the body movements. This issue is this: How do we as Christians relate our lives and our resources to the real needs of the human victims around us? This issue could take the form of some specific questions too. Like, How do we as Christians get rid of and replace the welfare system in America? Or, How do we as Christians preach the gospel in the Mississippi Delta? Or, How do we as Christians begin to minister in the hill district of Pittsburgh? How can we be part of declaring the glory of God in a local community?

To me, our legitimacy and our identity as the church of Jesus Christ is wrapped up in our response to the victims in our world. As Howard Snyder puts it in The Problem of Wineskins, IVP, p. 51, "The gospel to the poor and the concept of the church are inseparably linked. Failure to minister to the poor testifies to more than unfulfilled responsibility; it witnesses to a distorted view of the church."

But how can we minister to the poor? Evangelism could be part of the answer. Social action could be part of the answer. But we lack a comprehensive strategy for community development because we have cheapened our evangelism to a smile and "Jesus saves." We have cheapened our social action to charity and welfare. We have for the most part lost the sense of power that comes from being the body of Christ, a quiet revolution in the local community. The longer we worked in the community of Mendenhall, the more God unfolded to us the real power of the body of Christ, that it is not just a group; it is Christians coming together, cemented by their central unifying commitment to Christ. We began to see how we could be transformed into corporate power confronting corporate sin, corporately giving our lives in the direction of evangelism or justice, or economic development or relieving human need, and make a difference.

We must relearn what it means to be a body and what it means to continue Christ's ministry of preaching the gospel to the whole person. And I believe there is a strategy to do this. We have seen three principles work that seem to be at the heart of how a local body of Christians can affect their neighborhood. We call them the three "Rs" of the quiet revolution: relocation, reconciliation and redistribution.

First, we must relocate the body of Christ among the poor and in the area of need. I am not talking about a group of people renting a store-front through which to provide services to the community. I am talking about some of us people voluntarily and decisively relocating ourselves and our families for worship and for living within the poor community itself. A living involvement with people turns poor people from statistics into friends. I am not willing to lay down my life for a statistic. But I am more willing to lay down my life for my friends. Again, Jesus is our model.

Relocating myself makes me accountable to the real needs of the people because they become my needs. A person ministering from within the neighborhood or community will know and be able to start with the real needs of those around them, instead of forcing on the people what he or she has assumed their needs are. After meeting some real needs, you can begin to communicate through these "felt needs" to the deeper spiritual needs of a person. When this happens, we are beginning to transport God's glory into the community.

Second, we must reconcile ourselves across racial and cultural barriers. I hear people today talking about the black church and the white church. I do it too; it's reality. But it's not in Scripture. We should not settle for the reality our culture presents us with. You see, the whole idea of the love of God was to draw people together in one body - all reconciled to God. That is supposed to be the glory of the church! And we are not manifesting the love of God today that can really move across racial and cultural barriers. What we do is to go on preaching the gospel within the limits of our own culture and tradition.

The test of the gospel in the early days of the church was how it was going to affect Samaria. I believe the gospel is being tested again today. To reconcile people across racial lines - black people, white people, all people - is to stage a showdown between the power of God and the depth of the damage in us as human beings. It has been my experience that the power of God wins, and the result is a dynamic witness for Jesus Christ that brings others to confront him in their lives.

When reconciliation is taking place across cultural lines - between blacks and whites, between rich and poor, between indigenous and those who are new in the community - we are beginning to make visible God's glory in the community.

The final result is redistribution. We must as Christians seek justice by coming up with means of redistributing our goods and wealth to those in need. How well a ministry can begin the process of creating a stable economic base in the community determines the motivation of that ministry. Is it simple "charity"? Or is it really trying to develop people and to allow them to begin to determine their own destinies? It also determines the long-range effectiveness of a body's commitment to a neighborhood. For without an economic base there will never be a launching pad for ministry. A ministry in the poor community which has no plans to create economic support systems in the community is no better than the federal government's programs which last only as long as outside funds are budgeted. The longterm goal must be to develop a sense of self-determination and responsibility within the neighborhood itself.

We need a change created by Jesus Christ in our institutional behavior equal to the change that can occur in the life of an individual. And as we commit ourselves to just redistribution in terms of creating a new economics in broken communities, we can see how Jesus, through us, offers himself. The body of Christ becomes the corporate model through which we can live out creative alternatives that can break the cycles of wealth and poverty which oppress people.

When this happens, we are spreading God's glory in the community.

God's Spiritual Saboteurs

What if the churches began to relocate, reconcile and redistribute? What real effect could it have in the battle to make the gospel known in America?

I believe the welfare system in this country is one of the most wasteful and destructive institutions created in recent history. The dependence and exploitation it encourages, its inability to deal with the real, deep-seated needs of people is pitiful. In a speech he gave in the fall of 1973, however, Senator Mark Hatfield reveals some startling statistics that reveal the depth of the impact the church could have on our country and in meeting needs:

If each church and synagogue [in the U.S.] were to take over the responsibility of caring for 10 people over the age of 65 who are presently living below the poverty level, there would not be any need for the present welfare programs focused on the aged. If each church and synagogue took over the responsibility of 18 families - a total of 72 adults and children - who are eligible for welfare today, there would not be any need for the existing Federal or State welfare programs to families. If each church or synagogue cared for less than one child each, the present day care programs supported by Federal and State funds would be totally unnecessary. Our religious institutions would be a natural focus of community activity directed toward meeting the human needs of one's fellow citizens.
(The Congressional Record, Vol. 119, No. 145, Monday, October 1, 1973, Senate)

As churches become those centers for community activity, what a witness, what a testament, what an opportunity they would have among not only the needy (and primarily unchurched) people, but also to the world at large! It could be the most effective environment for evangelism ever seen on the face of the earth since the time the Master himself walked among the people healing, teaching and calling them to himself.

The civil rights movement died right on the brink of some real human development. We must have some people who will keep moving after the movement dies, after it is no longer popular to do what is right.

If we as Christians can see the issues of our day, the poverty, the racism, war and injustice, if we can use the skills and resources 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 and works to bear on the real issues of human need.

I believe that right now we are facing a most difficult time in history.

Do we see the battleline? Can black Christians and other oppressed Christians get beyond survival and blame? Can white Christians get beyond charity and the American dream? Can conviction be stronger than culture? Can we, like Zacchaeus, take responsibility for our past because of the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives now? Can we pay our dues and move creatively ahead to claim the joy of overcoming past injustice? Can we move beyond racism? Can we seek partnerships with brothers and sisters of another race? Can we seek the confrontations that will come from these partnerships and let Christ provide each other with the culture shock necessary to deeply question our values, to seriously investigate our lifestyles, our motives, to become skeptical about any good which we find in our deepest selves? Can we be called to a brotherhood like the one described in Proverbs where "Iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another"?

My hope is in Jesus Christ and the new life he can bring to a community. The people I work with and I have put our resources behind an alternative. But we cannot do it alone. We must create models that will break the cycle of poverty wherever it is. We must create models of health that will show the Kingdom to the world. Not only do we need cooperative development and local leadership, but we also need supply lines, transports, shock troops and guerrillas working as bodies in the system organizing resources and skills around areas of need. We need God's people to declare a salvation that saves people from their personal sins and goes on to make them whole and healthy.

The world is tiring, but we are to endure. The world will become frustrated, but we can have hope. The world will withdraw, but we must strike. We are God's guerrilla fighters, his spiritual saboteurs. We must now go in bodies to battle in our communities armed with the evangelism, social action, economic development and the burning desire for justice through which Jesus can continue to declare his glory in our communities.

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Declare His Glory in the Community (1976)

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December 27-31, 2009