Cities/Communities Conference Call
December 21, 2006
10 a.m. Central


Topic: Dr. John Perkins, 30th Anniversary of his impacting book, Let Justice Roll Down

Jarvis Ward welcomed early callers, who introduced themselves by name and city.

Dr. Paul Cedar introduced Dr. John Perkins. He said it is impossible to measure the impact of John’s ministry. He was impressed by attendance at the recent Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) annual meeting, where 2000 gathered, and an overwhelming number who were young people, impacted by John’s ministry to the poor. His book recently was recently reviewed by Christianity Today. Share with us, Brother.

Perkins: I must give credit to those who mentored me, partners together in ministry, my family, and the quality of friends God has given me. I’m daily humbled by the quality of friends God has given me. I realize I would have been sort of a loose cannon in the world but for the generosity and those friendships deep enough to talk to me, where I could share my weakness, and we could share together. That has been the living miracle in my own life. Brother Paul and so many others. Brother Paul has been one of those many who has under girded our ministry. I am so deeply grateful for him. It could not have been … I know God was involved. If you are going to take a position of justice and holiness, as Paul said, we can expect persecution and trials. Those persecutions and trials can make us strong if there are people with us, upholding us, so we can keep on pressing forward. I am honored to be on this phone call with you today.

Jarvis: God has used you all over the world. You have impacted lives. Your book has impacted cityreaching as we know it. So many who are involved in city reaching and transformation have been impacted by the book. Why did you decide to write the book? Has it had the impact you wanted?

Perkins: I wanted to share God’s redemptive work in my life, show the depths of the grace of God, that he could reach down for someone like me. I grew up without a father and mother, without the institution of love. That’s what the family is all about. That was my greatest loneliness and greatest doubt. When I heard there was a God in heaven who loved me and heard John 3:16, it was like the old Christmas hymn: “all the longings of the years are met in thee tonight.” When I realized that God loved me, the central message of the gospel. When I realized who I was, sinner, I wanted to give my life to this God and love him back. I remember the old Presbyterian elder who discipled me. I was afraid I might fall out of love with this God. I asked him how I could love God back. He had me open my Bible to Matt 25: “when I was hungry, you fed me; sick and in prison, you visited me; naked, you clothed me … etc. To serve God is to serve broken humanity, to serve the least of humanity. That’s what it means to me to love God back. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. The illustration I use is the Apostle Paul’s encounter on the Damascus road. In Philippians he says “that I may apprehend him, know him.” On that Damascus road God reached down in love to this apostle. For the rest of his life, he was trying to love God back. To him, this carrying of the gospel to the lost was his way of loving God back. I wanted to tell the depths of God’s grace that can reach down and get a person like me, forgive my sins, and then how he could work with me in the ongoing forgiveness of sin. There were times it would have been easier to hate people, like when I was beaten in jail. I really wanted the world to see how God had loved me. My expectation would be that it (the book) would embrace people, and people would read and be challenged by it. That has been a miracle, how people have been challenged by it. Maybe this new edition can reach a new generation of young people. That’s what is unique about a book – you can read it and pass it on to others. I am grateful, praying that this book would be sort of a road map. I’m a historian, one who reflects on time and writes it down. But it takes about 50 years for people to recognize that it is history. I pray it will be useful.

Glenn: In what you see happening in the world, how important are the issues raised in Let Justice Roll Down among evangelicals today?

Perkins: I think we need to keep the central message out front - God’s love. The gospel is good news about God who loved us so much that he can forgive us, and we can have a relationship with him. That our own sin has been forgiven. We have assurance of that. It’s crucial – the justice issue and forgiveness of sin is always relevant. When we look at it, especially today, all the wars that are raging right now are ethnic and racial and tribal and religious. We as Christians ought to see ourselves as peacemakers. If you look at the tribalism, Israel and Arab - they don’t have what it takes to forgive each other. The central message is there. God reached down and picked up a guy like me, a dropout, saved me, and then kept me thru all these situations. By his grace I’ve been able to forgive Tommy Tarrant – a KKK member who killed, destroyed a synagogue. He came to Christ and we became friends. When he escaped from prison, he went to hide out in the very county, to be protected by the sheriff who beat us up in prison. This message is so relevant – justice itself. We look at how we as evangelicals look at Israel and the Palestine people, recognizing that the Christians we have over there are primarily the Palestinian people, but we as evangelicals have not been able to remember that we come as equals to have sin forgiven. We need a balance between how we treat the Palestinians and the Jewish people. God calls people everywhere to come to him. We need to have that equal message to equal people in society. That’s like a blind spot in the evangelical community. I decided long ago that the evangelical faith has within it that good news that redeemed me. I will never be what you would classify a liberal. I forever want to be the one who proclaims that good news that redeems people. But we have blind spots as it relates to justice. That has been difficult in our own nation, ethnic groups. Fundamental Christians and southern Christians have been the people of racism in our society. We can cloud that with right wing conservatism, and accommodate all that racism within. We need a message today that calls us to repentance, justice and righteousness. The book is simple story, but justice for all is written on a 5th or 6th grade level.

Jarvis: Some evangelicals when they hear justice think only of racial Reconciliation, do you contend that justice is bigger than that?

Perkins: Justice is really a stewardship in relation to God, We are stewards of earth’s resources, to enhance life. Injustice is to discriminate in any way. So justice is an economic issue, how we manage, subdue, cultivate the earth, provide goods and services, and how we enhance life in an equitable way.
This guy who heads a health company who got over a billion dollars service pay for a public corporation. You don’t hear an outcry about that. That’s almost as big as Enron in greed. Some guy received $40 million as a bonus for this year’s work. Man! You don’t hear outrage in the evangelical church because they don’t understand that justice is an economic stewardship issue. You’ve got all these people without health care, and one man in health care gets all that money that is supposed to help these people. As long as Communism was alive, we had a challenge to our economic system, which is a good system. It’s run more creatively in America. But we don’t challenge it in our society. So there is a need for evangelicals to lift their voice higher.

Glenn: You seem to bring together these terms better than many. They seem to have been divorced in history. The fundamentalist controversy, advocates of either/or. When we think of taking the whole gospel to the whole world - not many have brought social justice and proclamation of the gospel together. Would you speak to how the term “social justice” hindered the advnce of the whole Gospel among evangelicals?


Perkins: I think of Bin Laden in his cave, I think his concern was that the economic system was corrupt, using naked women as a marketing tool, pushing our products all over the world. When Peter shared the gospel in Jerusalem and he was imprisoned, the angel told him to go to the synagogue and preach. I think we have made our religion a religious sounding message, leaving out the justice issues. We do the religious talk, but don’t see the prophetic voice. Prophets talked about behavior, how the rich oppressed the poor, how we live and how the economy worked. The Christian church has lost that. It has bought into the oppressive system. Racism in our society - this system is upheld by white men. So we don’t have a prophetic understanding of the gospel, how we are to be salt and light. We restrain evil, but we also need to show people how to talk in the right way. Evangelicals have made it into a religious message preached on Sunday morning.

Question & Answer

Jarvis: We’re going to move into our Q and A time now. Please give your name and where you are calling from as you ask your question. I would remind you that our website is www.cityreaching.com and the transcript of this call will be there. We are also asking any of you who have read the book, to give us a short paragraph of how that book has impacted you, and email it to info@cityreadching.com. We’ll post those responses as part of the conference call. The book is available at e-bay. If you have 3-4 others you want to share this with, you should be able to get it by New Year’s at least. Where else can people get it?


Perkins: You can get it from us. I don’t know all this dot-com stuff. We have a website. www.jmpf.org.

A caller suggested Google “John M. Perkins Foundation”.

Jarvis: I’m going to ask Ron Thaxton, who has kind of been our righteousness and justice guy, and has written a paper. Some feel we have hit a wall in city reaching, and that one reason is this Righteousness & Justice issue. Ron, would you speak briefly to your contention that justice is a missing link in seeing transformation occur in our cities.

Ron: We’ve developed our local City Impact Roundtable (CIR) here in partnership with LC2C (Loving Our Communities to Christ). Yesterday we were meeting, and I shared an excerpt from the Lausanne Covenant. It referred to Phil 1:27. In 1970 God wrote that scripture on my heart, including v 28, regarding the unity, wholeness of the church, as in one city, many congregations. In 1976 we began praying together, bringing the church here (Charleston, WV) together. Honestly, when we look around, I don’t see that things have gotten any better. What I believe is that in the past 2-3 years, after 10-11 years of fellowshipping with the African American community here, it’s taken ten years of fellowshipping with these dear friends for me, as a white evangelical, to understand what justice is all about. I’ve come to see that the foundation of his throne is right and just. The missing link – without a systematic, citywide initiative to correct injustice, we are not going to see any form of lasting transformation.

Jarvis: That paper is posted on the cityreaching website. What would you say, Dr. Perkins?
Perkins: I would say Amen. When you look at justice – God’s motivation for redemption, that’s the redemptive story. If my people will humble themselves … that’s righteousness. Forgive our sins, heal our lands. Justice is necessary so righteousness can flow. As we look at it in history, people will seek a closer relationship. So I agree.


Mark O’Brien, Denver: Dr. John, you spoke at a Colorado prayer luncheon in May, 2005. I got to see the DVD afterwards because I was in a prayer room. What struck me was with respect to justice. As I reviewed that a couple of weeks ago, you mentioned that throughout history, and we are entering into a time when people’s misery - we are now experiencing that with the migrant community and immigrant community, not just Hispanic, but that seems to be where the focus is. My question is, I want to reach out to the evangelical community in Denver. I’ve written to thirty pastors, but have had no response. The indifference and apathy is deeply discouraging. I would ask those on this call and you, Dr. Perkins, if you would help me to reach out to the evangelical community in Denver and other cities and help them understand the role of the church in defending the rights of the poor and standing for justice.

Perkins: Jarvis and I have talked about some kind of summit where we can face up, like we are here on this line, but come together and bring that, like we brought the Lausanne Covenant, and we followed up in Grand Rapids with the social replication of that. Now we need to come together and talk about justice and the application of that. You can’t do it alone. There are others in the evangelical church – we’ve got to come together and be thoughtful. I think holding something like that, shape it a little like Ray Stedman did expository preaching. He set up ten years to emphasize Biblical preaching. I think pastors would come together and support that.

Jarvis: In Charleston, WV, a pilot city for LC2C – one of the things they have given serious focus to is justice. They are looking to pull together something like that in their city context. There is some discussion of possibly convening a national but multi-city breakout. We would travel to these cities, individual cities processing internally. If any on the call would be interested, it is being planned for May 15-17, Tuesday – Thursday. Details will be forthcoming. Dr. Perkins will be convening this with several others. Maybe we could have a 4-5 year focus, not ten years.

Rebecca Pippert: Where did you say this would be?

Jarvis: In Charleston, WV.

Ron Thaxton: How do you raise the awareness among evangelicals? It was a process for me. We started meeting together; our local CIR was a Righteousness & Justice task group. We came together - only significant minority community here is African American. We came together and told our stories. I was seeing that we were reading the same Bible but coming out with two different applications. So we started along that pathway. That’s been nearly a two-year process. There are some white evangelicals who are becoming aware of this. At one of our meetings some months ago, a pastor said “My people don’t get it.” They were white evangelical Republicans, for the most part and the KJV comes out judgment.

Richard Allen Farmer, Dallas, TX: I would be interested to know how Dr. Perkins sees these models of justice as replicable in other cultures. I know he want to Jamaica.

Perkins: It’s difficult. I think you have to know the injustice issues there. It’s difficult without the people themselves taking responsibility. Part of our way of doing evangelism in the world has been promoting sort of an accommodating gospel to the world. You need to go into the culture and get to the issues those people are aching with.

A participant (muffled phone line) asked: Do you see the academic educational system addressing the justice issue?

Perkins: It’s difficult to ask secular institutions to implement Biblical justice. Now, you say the church needs to influence those institutions, and I think that’s what we are trying to do. Here in Jackson we are mentoring in a school. It’s influencing, our light shining within those public institutions. Otherwise the Civil Liberties Union would get us.

Final Announcements

Jarvis: This call will be posted at www.cityreaching.com Hopefully we will get the recording of this call. If you have read the book Let Justice Roll Down, please respond to us with your comments.

Glenn: If you have a question about anything that came up on the call, whether the Righteousness & Justice meeting or CIR or pre-meetings. If you have a heart for calling the whole church in your city to come together and see the whole gospel expressed in your city, you will want to come to El Paso April 19-21. CIR information is at www.cityreaching.com. Email info@cityreaching.com with any questions. The CIR early bird rate ends Jan. 15th. We are excited about having Reid Carpenter there to share principles they have learned through Leadership Foundation, and Eric Swanson will share how churches can have a stronger witness as externally focused churches. That opens the door for our witness for Christ. Thank you, Dr. Perkins, for being on the call today. Before you leave, we have asked Rebecca Pippert, well known author and leader in prayer, to close our time in prayer. On behalf of Jarvis and me and Dr. Cedar, we want to wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Rebecca Pippert closed in a prayer of thanksgiving for Dr. Perkins.

The next call will be January 18, 2007.