A Strategy for Change

The reality of the war we wage today is that we face problems of crime and violence, famine, mental illnesses such as racism, an unstable economy that depletes our environment and crushes the poor, poor housing, governmental corruption, boredom and meaninglessness, and the erosion of the family. And the fact is that we, as a society, have found no solutions -- not one. Over the past few years our vast networks of public relations and promotional advertising have been trying to convince us that solutions are at hand or just down the road a little further. But the crime rates still climb, and the number of people starving in this country is increasing. In my county in Mississippi, where more than 50 percent of the housing is substandard, construction is down by two-thirds, people are losing their jobs, and a lot of black and a few white babies are dying because of poor health care. In both urban and rural areas, desperate problems go without solutions.

I say there are no solutions to emphasize my belief that traditional solutions to the problems facing our country are totally inadequate. In an address he gave in November 1974, Sen. Mark Hatfield explained that there are up to “64 different factors which, singly and in combination, can affect food production and demand,” and that “any effort that addresses only one of these factors and ignores the others will fail.”

I think that is the nature of the war which we are called to wage in our communities. Traditional solutions are not effective because they are not comprehensive enough in scope. In the true sense of the word, they are not “radical” enough, they do not attack the roots of problems. Our society sees problems individually rather than as symptoms of some very deep and cancer-like illness affecting our whole system. We are unable to deal with the roots of problems because we are unable to deal with or change basic human values.

There is no need for spot treatments. There is a need for radical surgery, for a comprehensive approach to community development. And that will require special tools. In general we must seek ways to redistribute the wealth and the land and to consciously gear down our lifestyles and consumption. At the grassroots community level we need to both develop new methods of training indigenous Christian leadership and to develop co-operative economic ventures among poor people, thereby creating a base from which to preach and do the gospel. For such a grassroots community base to develop there must be Christians outside the community who are dedicated to supporting such efforts through both technical assistance and the development of viable economic vehicles for development. These are the tools of development which we must have now, but which have been ignored in the past, and in a sense, have to be ignored if the American system is to preserve itself as it is today. To pick up these tools of community development demands a new system of values.

I have no hope that the world will find this value system anywhere within the strategies it has already formulated. I am convinced that Christians, although sadly retarded during the last decades of withdrawal from social involvement, may be the only ones able to provide leadership. I believe this because the necessary breaks with the present system and its mind-set require an experience of deep repentance, a thorough going transformation of the mind through the power of God, and an openness to biblical strategies of human development. I believe that these are found only in the context of a life committed to Jesus Christ, His body of believers, and His inspired scriptures.

Traditional Christian strategies have not worked and will not work because they have relied too much on cultural values. We “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). I am convinced that the “world rulers of this present darkness” and those who own the system have created a culture for black people and a culture for white people that so camouflages the battleline that their efforts as Christians trying to preach and practice the gospel are made ineffective.

For many black Christians it begins with an inability to go beyond the point where “my problems are just how to survive.” Survival has become a “game-show lifestyle.” I have seen too many of my black brothers and sisters making $12,000 a year but still “trying to make it.”

The slavery exists when we as oppressed people accept our oppressors' value system and define our problems from the system’s point of view rather than seeing the desperate psychological slavery in which many blacks live. I can not help but remember the section in 2 Peter 2, where he describes the false teachers who will “secretly bring in destructive heresies,” “and many will follow their licentiousness, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words,” or as it says in the King James, they will “make merchandise of you.”

I find it very difficult to criticize the black church. I thank God for the black church, that through it He was able to maintain sanity and meet the deep emotional needs of a people under oppression. The church helped people survive.

But we must move beyond survival. The tragedy is that so many blacks have bought the American Dream, not only bought it, but bought it with money borrowed from white banks at 12 to 18 percent interest. The purchase of the American Dream, with all of its consumerism and competition and survival mentality, has taken our minds and our resources away from the battleline. The American Dream is keeping us from developing our own local leadership and our own economic base from which we can begin to preach the gospel in our communities

From a biblical perspective, the situation in the white church is far more dangerous. Black cultural camouflage is rooted in ignorance and oppression. But with the knowledge of the Bible and the resources of the earth, white cultural camouflage is rooted in negligence and apostasy. Still, the effect is the same: to cause white Christians to lose sight of the battleline.

The comfort culture wins too many times. Almost without exception, when it comes down to a confrontation between racism and Christian conviction in white people, racism wins out. I have seen this trap Southern white ministers. In fact, I saw a relationship between me and a Baptist preacher in Mendenhall, Mississippi, awaken his convictions. But the rejection he received after moving out on those convictions moved him to suicide.

Other cultural values have crept into white Christian strategies. One of these is the whole "volunteer and charity" mentality. I have seen volunteers look back on their one, two, or three years of service and say that they have already given to such and such for so many years. They then think they’ve paid their dues. This attitude can be devastating to a community, because people I’m with demand a trust relationship before they will commit themselves to me, my program, or my God. Local projects demand steadfast support in order to grow and develop. But white Christians have the luxury of “short-term” commitment, and the most deadly thing about this mentality is that it is spreading to many black people, who having experienced the mobility of the middle class for the first time, make a big thing of dedicating may be two years of their lives to some “charitable” work.

Another luxury of an affluent culture that can camouflage the battleline is blindness to the economics of the gospel. A person free to pop into a community for a little while and then pop out, or one who even decides to give to a project, may still very easily maintain his guts or her lifestyle back in the system and never have to deal with the basic question of “where does the money come from to do the Lord’s will?”

I know a white young woman who got very upset with Voice of Calvary’s plans to develop a Christian investment bank for black rural development. She couldn’t see the development of a bank as part of the gospel message. Reacting to the idea out of her own struggles with materialism, she had the luxury of taking this very “moralistic” position on money even though when it came time for her and her husband to build a house, they could borrow over $7,000 from her parents. White people cannot afford to allow their culture or their reactions to it to blind them to economic reality. And that reality is that black children just do not have mommy and daddy with $7,000 right at hand.

If we intend to call black young people to return to their communities out in the rurals and in the cities, we must develop plans to allow them to develop their own indigenous financial bases. In the end, to talk about human development without economic development is hypocrisy.

Traditional Christian strategies have not worked and will not work because they have relied too heavily on cultural values. We still lack the leadership and economic development which must come from the black or indigenous community. Resources and technical assistance to bring that development together on a larger scale are also now insufficient. In short, 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 or welfare. Without evangelism or social action the only political encounter we have may be the hope of a Christian president. And that has not worked.

I am dedicated to a strategy for community development that involves three basic thrusts: evangelism, social action and political encounter. I believe these three to be biblical and would like to share them from that perspective and from my own testimony and involvement in what God is doing in Mississippi.

All movements including community development begin with individuals acting upon what they believe. The Lord began this process of belief in me back in 1957. For the next three years he drew me away from seeing my needs as just economic, which is the way I saw them until that time. He gave me a burning desire to share His gospel. I wanted to yield my whole life to him as Lord.

I had absolutely no strategy for taking the gospel to my people other than I had spoken to young people before and knew I could do that. My wife and I began to share with young kids, even getting into the public schools. Soon we were speaking to 10,000 children each month. We were also holding rural home Bible studies. People were making commitments to Christ, even though it was a tough gospel which we preached, a gospel that went against the grain of the established religious institutions.

Our struggle to systematically bring the Word of God into the lives of these people led to the discovery of three basic principles that have been central to our ministry since then: that the church of Christ has the possibility of cracking cultural barriers, that God’s strategy is to raise up disciples to carry out leadership, and that evangelism leads to social action.

It was not until we really began to call people who had met Christ to a regular discipline of worship that we began to see people shaped by His Lordship and not just saved by His grace. There arose some key leaders, both among the old and among the young. The older leaders are now influencing their home churches as deacons and elders. And the young we began to send off to school to get the skills necessary to carry on the work back home. As these young people have returned over the years we have seen God add to the indigenous leadership base. Since then we have discovered the real meaning of the Body of Christ; that it’s not just a group, but as Christians came together, cemented by their unifying common commitment to Christ, the Lord actually began to flesh out his body in our midst, we began to see how we could be transformed into a corporate power, where we could corporately give our lives in some direction and make a difference. The stage was set for social action.

Through our evangelism, the Lord had taken us into the very lives of people, into their hearts and into their homes, bringing us face to face with their needs. We saw that people could not read the Bibles and tracts we gave them. We saw children who could not think because they had not had enough to eat. We saw that the conditions in peoples’ homes would keep them from getting well if they got sick. We were kept from slipping into the mold of the “Jesus Saves, smiling evangelism” because God kept us in contact with the felt needs of the people.

Through evangelism the Lord provided us with a real perspective of needs, a broad base of community support among the blacks, and a few key leaders -- prime components for social action.

There were times when social action was a bad word, when evangelicals could not bring themselves to be involved in social action because they so closely associated it with liberalism. But now, Voice of Calvary is beginning to be looked at as a model. It is nothing of which I can boast. It is a model because God has led us. A true model breaks old patterns and cycles. Jesus Christ was a true model because he broke my own personal cycle of sin and selfishness and he breaks into the lives of others in the same way. And we have experienced him creating models of housing, economic development, education, evangelism, and now healthcare that are breaking the patterns that make up the cycle of poverty, economics, as well as sin, in peoples’ lives individually and in local institutions.

Just as evangelism led to involvement in social action, social action resulted in political encounter. Our political encounters did not start until we began to get involved in the area of economics. When Paul cast out the spirit of divination from the slave girl in Philippi (Acts 16), the owners who had made money from the girl’s soothsaying seized Paul and Silas and accused them before the rulers of disturbing the peace. We found the same type of response. When your practice of the gospel begins to threaten the deepest sources of meaning in the system, the system will encounter you; and when it does, it could cost you your life.

Perhaps this is why the most revolutionary activity in which a person can be involved is a strategy of community development which begins with evangelism. When you begin with an evangelism that demands a response to Christ’s Lordship, then the issue of life and death is settled. Like Paul, we can say “I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave him self for me” (Galatians 2:20).

If we begin with that type of commitment, then we can risk political encounter in a society in which all the power of the system may be directed against the person or group who threatens the maintenance of the system itself. When we walked the streets of Mendenhall, when we bought only from our own store, when we registered voters, when we tutored children, when we interceded for people beaten in jail, when we were ourselves locked in jail and beaten, there was doubt in many peoples’ minds. They thought we were unpatriotic; they thought we were unchristian. They knew we were disrupting the system. But there was never any doubt in our minds that we followed Jesus Christ and were doing God’s will.

In the end, political encounter is good. I define it as a confrontation of values. Sometimes it takes place in the streets, sometimes in Congress or at the polls. But from the Christian perspective it is the result of fleshing out the Lordship of Christ. It is good because it spreads our salt and shines our light.

This, then, is the comprehensive biblical approach to community development that has worked at Voice of Calvary. Evangelism creates the committed people, the concern for the needs of people and the broad community base from which to launch social action. Social action fleshes out the Lordship of Christ, reaches spiritual needs through felt needs, and results in developing an indigenous economic base and political encounter. With time, the visible result of all three is community development. For Voice of Calvary it is an ongoing church, health center, tutorial school, and other programs which draw people and are by nature evangelistic. The cycle reinforces itself.

I believe that right now we are facing a most difficult time in history. We are discovering that old strategies have failed and that the new ones, or rediscovered ones, will not let us hold onto our old lifestyles.

But I feel time slipping away. Just as people are beginning to look for these new strategies, I see the tide of concern going out again. I see that racism and self-interest are stronger in the society at large than the legislation which created integration, open voting, and various programs for relief. We have lived through a short lull in the fighting with the world that took place when people were forced to conform to laws of state. But the fact is that transformation has not taken place and so I doubt the future.

I see it in the wind. As times get worse economically and psychologically, as people lose their jobs, times get tight and charity dries up, and the Klan rises in Illinois, Florida, and Louisiana. But are Christians prepared? The fact is that we are at war with the world -- not détente, not ceasefire, not a time-out, not peaceful coexistence -- but war.

Do we see the battleline? Can black Christians and other oppressed Christians get beyond survival? Can white Christians get beyond charity? 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? 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. I have stopped dreaming about a reformed society. The people I work with and I have put our resources behind an alternative, not a reform. But we cannot do it alone. Not only do we need co-operative development and local leadership, but we also need supply lines, transports, shock troops and guerrillas in the system organizing resources and skills around areas of need. We need white people to create the economic development vehicles that can provide large amounts of capital for grassroots development.

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 to battle in our communities armed with the evangelism, social action, and political encounter through which Jesus can work.

When this article appeared, John Perkins was a contributing editor and president of Voice of Calvary, located in Mendenhall and Jackson, Mississippi.