The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

During my years as a university president, one of my joys was to be involved in inviting various leaders to our campus for a lecture series, Bible conferences, and other university events.  One of the highlights of that joy was a conference that introduced Rev. John M. Perkins to our students. He became one of my heroes and stands out as one of the important evangelical, Black leaders of the church.

Perkins died in March 2026 at the age of 95.  I have read several of his obituaries and learned a great deal about his life and ministry.  He manifested a deep-seated commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a commitment to social justice issues.  If I read the New Testament correctly, the Gospel and social justice should complement one another in ministry (see the epistle of James and the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus).  Perkins balanced these two aspects of ministry well.  As the obituary by Sarah Pullima Bailey observed, “Perkins’s central insight, which he first gained in the 1960s, was that faith leaders could best help impoverished communities by connecting spiritual nourishment—helping people develop a rich interior life with Jesus through the Gospel—to a more programmatic mission of fostering social and economic uplift. It was a faith-based Christian social movement that he called the whole Gospel.’” Indeed, Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who had written about Mr. Perkins, called him “one of the most transformative Black Christian voices in the years after the civil rights struggle.”

First of all, a short biography of John Perkins. Much of it based on Bailey’s obituary: John M. Perkins—he said he never knew what the middle initial stood for—was born on June 16, 1930, in New Hebron, Miss., the youngest of six children. The next year, his mother, Maggie (Waller) Perkins, died of pellagra, a chronic vitamin deficiency exacerbated by malnutrition. His father, Jasper Perkins, left the family. The children were dispersed among relatives. John was raised by his paternal grandmother and his extended family of sharecroppers and bootleggers. He quit school in third grade to work at a cotton plantation. By 12, he was making 15 cents a day hauling hay while seeing white workers being paid $2 for the same labor—an injustice that awakened him to racial and economic inequality, he later remembered.

Four years later, his older brother Clyde, just home from Army service in World War II, was shot twice in the stomach by a town marshal for talking back and grabbing the officer’s club after being hit with it. Mr. Perkins recalled holding his brother’s head in the back seat of a car as they raced to a hospital in Jackson—one that would accept Black patients. Clyde was declared dead at the hospital.

For his safety, Mr. Perkins was sent to stay with an uncle in Monrovia, Calif., northeast of Los Angeles. After Army service in Japan during the Korean War, he became a janitor at the Shopping Bag food-store chain and so impressed the owner with his work ethic that he was promoted to a department that helped make shopping carts. It was this job, he said, that allowed him to buy a home in Monrovia for his growing family, having married Vera Mae Buckley in 1951. As he told it, he spent his days forgetting the past and striving for material gain. But one day, burned out, he suddenly found himself emotionally overwhelmed seeing his 4-year-old son, Spencer, smiling beatifically and singing a song about Jesus’s love for children of all colors. He had learned the song at summer Bible school at an evangelist church. Spencer’s happiness stirred a curiosity in Mr. Perkins, and he began accompanying his son to the church. It was a revelation to him, he said, to see Black and white congregants worshiping together—something inconceivable in Mississippi at the time. He began attending adult Bible study classes. Even more revelatory to him, he said, was a visit to a nearby prison camp on a mission to convert souls. He was “horrified,” he said, to see so many Black teenagers incarcerated so close to his suburban haven. As he gave his testimony, he said, he was moved by how they cried when they heard his own story of growing up grindingly poor and feeling empty and embittered until finding communion with God.

“It was the first time in my life,” he told Professor Marsh in a 2009 interview, “that I realized that in sharing the gospel, it was possible that God could transform, and take what I had shared and affect other people’s lives.” After being ordained a Baptist minister in 1958, Mr. Perkins wrote, he felt called to return to Mississippi, “to identify with my people there, and to help break the cycle of despair—not by encouraging them to leave, but by showing them new life where they were.” With financial support from the evangelical Calvary Bible Church in Burbank, Calif., he moved to Mendenhall, southeast of Jackson, and started his ministry.

Second, a brief overview of his ministry and legacy, much of it from Bailey’s obituary:

• Against the backdrop of the civil rights era, Mr. Perkins transformed his Mississippi-based ministry—based in the small town of Mendenhall and later in Jackson, the capital—into an enterprise that included a church, a day care, a health center, a thrift store and programs for youth sports, housing cooperatives, leadership training, legal assistance and adult education. “People were asking the question, How do we take this precious gospel to the poor without dehumanizing them and without making a free handout?” the Rev. Dolphus Weary, who succeeded Mr. Perkins in running the ministry, said in an interview. “John Perkins gave people the concept of how to do that.”
• Over the years—in lectures, books, articles in Christian publications and fund-raising tours—he developed an even more ecumenical vision: of communities of Black and white Christians living and working together in distressed communities. Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and human rights advocate who founded the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, said Mr. Perkins left a significant imprint. He not only wanted Black people “to recover from bigotry and make progress — he definitely focused on that,” Mr. Stevenson said, “but he wanted everybody to hear a message of redemption.”
• In 1982, Mr. Perkins moved to Pasadena, Calif., intending to retire but soon saw a need to start a new ministry in a blighted, crime-ridden neighborhood there. Soon, he helped create two organizations: the Christian Community Health Fellowship, a network of clinics and doctors and other medical professionals to care for the underserved; and the even broader Christian Community Development Association. The C.C.D.A. involved thousands of individuals and hundreds of churches working at the grass-roots level with organizations like Head Start and Habitat for Humanity to help the poor and the dispossessed—welfare recipients, crack addicts—achieve self-sufficiency through jobs; safe, new homes; and spiritual salvation. “The highest calling of God is to love your neighbor as you love yourself,” Mr. Perkins told The Baltimore Sun in 1994, speaking of his C.C.D.A. work. The organization, he said, was “styled on the life of Jesus, who had the greatest concern for the weakest of people.”

Russell Moore correctly argues that “Perkins truly believed what Paul wrote: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18–19, ESV) . . .  Perkins combined preaching the gospel, registering people to vote, advocating for justice and civil rights, and starting neighborhood initiatives to give the poor hope—not only for the life to come but also for escaping poverty now. Yet he never gave up on reconciliation, even with those who hated him. Perkins refused to treat the greatest commandment (“Love the Lord your God,” Matt. 22:37) and the second-greatest commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself,” v. 39) as separate options on a multiple-choice quiz. Perkins stood with ideas and action and the kind of moral authority that can come only from testing those ideas with his life—standing for something true and loving something real. That’s the kind of witness Perkins was. And that’s what made him seem so strange in this juvenile, demoralized time.”

David French comments that “We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse. For example, in a 2022 survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year. Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most. In the morality and ethics survey I mentioned at the start of the column, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were more likely to believe that other Americans were unethical or immoral than Republicans. But in the 2022 survey, Republicans were more likely to believe that Democrats were dishonest, immoral and lazy. If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the best way to imagine the other side’s view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them. To say that both sides view each other with equivalent disdain is not to say that both sides are equally dangerous.”

He concludes that “To call for decency doesn’t deny the depth of our disagreements. It does, however, acknowledge the essential humanity of our opponents. I keep thinking about the commitment card that Martin Luther King Jr. asked his followers to sign before they joined the 1963 Birmingham campaign. The 10 directives included these admonitions: “Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus,” “Remember always that the nonviolent movement seeks justice and reconciliation — not victory,” “Walk and talk in the manner of love, for God is love,” and “Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue or heart.”

John Perkins was a transformational leader, whose life and legacy are a testimony to the power of the Gospel to transform a life and transfer society. He preached the antidote to the hate culture French talks about above. That is his legacy! Although he is now with his Savior, we will miss his balance, fortitude and deep-seated commitment to Jesus Christ.

See New York Times obituary  of Perkins by Sarah Pulliam Bailey (17 March 2026); Russel Moore, Moore to the Point (18 March 2026); and David French in the New York Times (15 March 2026).