Dream with Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win

by John M. Perkins

For decades I’ve tried to meet people where they hurt. I’ve preached and desired to see “justice for all,” and I still fervently believe in it. God loves justice and wants His people to seek justice (see Ps. 11 and Mic. 6:8). But I’ve come to understand that true justice is wrapped up in love.

We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just

as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love.

But it is time to repent. It is time to forgive. It is time to move forward from the racism and bigotry that we have allowed to define us for too long. It is time for love, rather than pride and division, to be our final fight.

Second Corinthians 5:19 says this so clearly: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” The church has been given the message of reconciliation. We are to proclaim it. If we are not reconciling, how can we call ourselves the church?

The church is to be the incarnated Christ here on earth now, which means all members ought to be doing the work Christ did while He was here.

Whites need to take some responsibility for centuries of imperialism and failing to repent, but blacks also need to take some responsibility for the breakdown of our families. We all need to take responsibility for providing equal education and job training for all people and doing a better job of training our police officers not to resort to brutality.

American society has lost its capacity for pluralism in many ways. We have begun to believe that if others don’t agree with us, then we don’t have to listen to them. We dehumanize people who don’t think like we do and, consequently, justify our violence against them. But we all are created in God’s image. We all are His children. We live in a country that proclaims freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and we must be willing to listen to and try to understand the thoughts and ideas of others. This is the way to make change happen without violence.

The first R is the toughest but most crucial one. People jump on the relocation bandwagon with enthusiasm, then want to compromise when they actually try to live it out. To relocate means to move from one place to another, from the old to the new. It can be exciting, profoundly biblical, and even romantic in an odd way.

To me, relocation is about incarnation. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lau Tzu provided a good description of what this means: “Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’

When you go to the place God has called you to go, are you a martyr or are you living out the highest possible calling in your life? Do you really lose anything when you give up everything to get exactly what God wants for you?

The second R—reconciliation—is the heart of the gospel. It is the process by which God brings us to Him and keeps us. It is the main activating force within the redemptive idea. It is the process of forgiveness of sin. The Bible makes it clear that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19 NKJV). It’s also the process by which believers in Christ are joined to one another: “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Eph. 2:15–16).

God is all about reconciliation, but we run the risk of missing Him when we allow racial reconciliation, or any kind of reconciliation, to rise as the dominating force—if we allow it rather than God Himself to become the ultimate goal. I see how this happens—it makes sense when we have been so damaged by division, hostility, and oppression.

The third R—redistribution—tends to make some folks nervous. They hear the word and think it’s some sort of Robin Hood thing or a Communist conspiracy—taking from the rich and giving to the poor. That’s not what I mean at all. That wouldn’t work anyway. I’m not suggesting that we move money around or level everything out so everyone has exactly the same amount. What I envision is Christians developing a new perspective on resources. Look around at everything God has created in this world! How can there not be enough to meet everyone’s basic needs—food, housing, clothing, health care, and so on? We ought to talk about redistributing opportunities.

This is real redistribution: the people with the most skills and opportunities sharing with those who don’t have them.

Relocation is imitating Christ, who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:7) so He could show us the full extent of God’s love. Reconciliation is God bringing people into relationship with Himself and other people. Redistribution is caring for others’ needs as we care for our own.

One can have the gift of teaching or preaching or mercy or hospitality, but the greatest blessing is being able to share that gift with others. When Christ came down full of grace and truth, He imparted those gifts onto us. To live incarnationally means that we also continue to give these gifts away in order to edify the body of Christ.

The writer of Hebrews gave us this exhortation: “And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Heb. 10:24–25). That active presence of other believers contributes to God’s work within us. Again, it’s not that God needs us to complete what He is doing—but He allows that human dimension to be a part of His redemptive work.

Justice is an economic and stewardship issue. When Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the LORD’S, and everything in it,” that’s a justice statement. The way we utilize the resources we’ve been given determines whether we are being just.

Black theology is alien to most white people—and if they hear a little bit of it in a negative context or out of context, they’re likely to have a serious problem with it. Racism creates anger. Because of the blatant racism of the past and its common occurrence today, many white Christians do just enough social good in the black community to salve their consciences while maintaining imperialistic theology. They do just enough to get by without repentance.

This illustrates a problem with black theology—or at least black Christian practice. Unfortunately, often the black community is very slow to forgive, expecting white people to prove their repentance by their works. We know from Jesus’s teaching on prayer—“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12 NKJV)—how essential it is for us to forgive one another. We also know that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23 NKJV), and in America it’s pretty safe to say that blacks and whites and the other ethnic groups represented have all sinned against one another. So all parties need to repent, and all parties need to forgive. This is the only way out of the hostility and division we have long accommodated in many different kinds of churches.

justice is any act of reconciliation that restores any part of God’s creation back to its original intent, purpose, or image.

Frederick Douglass said there isn’t a single attribute of God, not a single thought, which would accommodate the oppression of another. How can you oppress a brother or sister and call yourself a child of God? To put it another way, “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them” (1 John 2:11).

In the Old Testament, the prophets proclaimed God’s plans and purposes to the people of Israel. But as I look at the end of the Gospels, at the giving of the Great Commission, Jesus’s ascension, and then the beginnings of the early church in Acts, it is clear that God has called His church to be the prophetic voice in our society today. Peter and James, in particular, write that God is calling out His church to be His people who bear His name and relay His will and purposes to the world (see 1 Pet. 4 and James 2).

Real repentance and forgiveness requires psychological pain. It requires us to actually wrestle with what happened, to feel true remorse. Only when we are willing to grapple with the deep guilt and reality of our sin can we fully free one another with true forgiveness. The price is hefty, but the reward at the end is worth it.

The truth is, human beings were created as one race—in the image of God. For some reason or another, though, we have doubted that central truth. We have allowed ourselves to believe we are divided by deep and irreconcilable differences, but that is not the truth of the gospel. When Jesus came and died on the cross to reconcile the world to Himself, He, through His blood, brought peace into this world (see Col. 1:20). But we have not allowed this peace to take root or these broken-down walls to be realized. Instead, we have tried to come up with human solutions and means of reconciliation. Instead of trusting in our great God, who created only one race and did the work of reconciliation for us, we have persisted in searching for ways to bridge a gap that doesn’t even really exist.

The gospel’s very purpose is to reconcile. The church is energized by a wholeness—by taking the gospel to the whole world. I think I have made that clear repeatedly throughout this book. But still, we have not come to fully understand this. “From one blood,” we are told, God made “every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26 NKJV). We have to start seeing this cohesion, this oneness.