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

by John M. Perkins

Time, as well as wealth, must be stewarded in a way that is pleasing to God. But the truth is that there is enough time and enough wealth to go around. The people in the churches every Sunday outnumber the people who are on the streets and the number of people on welfare. If the church took up the responsibility of caring for the poor, of living incarnationally, of participating in the unspeakable gift of giving, our world would look much different from the way it does today.

Justice is a stewardship issue, caring for the poor is a stewardship issue, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is a stewardship issue. We have the resources, but our priorities aren’t there yet. If I could call the church to task on one more thing in the years I have left, it would be to start stewarding our resources in a way that adheres to the will of God and is in line with His kingdom.

We can look to the apostle Paul’s example: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). I long to see the church give up its power and privilege the way Jesus did when He c...

To put it in very general terms, white theology (especially white evangelical theology) has tended to focus on the personal side of redemption. Emphasis has been placed on evangelism, salvation, and individual spiritual growth and holiness—with the Bible being regarded as a devotional book that inspires believers individually. This focus is terribly important, of course, because it highlights the relationships between people and God. It also recognizes a crucial and painful truth about justice: apart from the blood of Christ, justice is bad news for sinful human beings. At least it’s bad news if we’re talking about the type of justice that demands that a penalty be paid when a wrong is done.

The good news of the gospel is that God has made a way to satisfy the demands of justice through sacrifice and redemption rather than through judgment and condemnation.

Black theology has a very different take on both redemption and justice, in part because much of it has been developed in response to white oppression. In terms of redemption—or liberation—black theology builds on the “Let my people go!” model of Moses. It celebrates God’s history of delivering His people from slavery and oppression and regards redemption as communal as well as individual. As black Christians, we almost always see religion as something that uplifts people, and the Bible is considered a textbook for living. Black theology doesn’t specify that blacks and whites should be separate, but sadly it has turned out that way.

We never should have needed or wanted black theology. If the church in America more generally had arrived at a theology that included an increased understanding of God’s redemptive work, we all would be better off. White theology, however, has a serious problem: because the church added “racial” to reconciliation as part of the gospel in an effort to accommodate racism, the stream was poisoned. Even today, many church leaders maintain that it is inappropriate or even evil to organize their congregations to get them to protest injustice. Thus, the struggle to understand biblical truth about justice and redemption continues. 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 the...

We have accommodated the racism and the segregation in society for so long that we have lost our ability to hear or understand one another.

black theology also has a different—or at least another—emphasis when it comes to justice. Old Testament justice laws aren’t just about punishing sin; they’re also about preventing oppression. They’re about making sure that each person in the community is cared for and given an opportunity to flourish. Instructions about gleaning (see Lev. 23:22) and the year of Jubilee (see Lev. 25:8–55), for instance, demonstrate God’s desire that the poor should have ways to feed themselves and chances to get out from under debilitating debt. We often refer to this type of justice as social justice, and this is something that has been important to the black church in America. This is the type of justice I’ve frequently spoken and written about—it’s a social and economic concept that moves people in a community toward mutual concern and both individual and collective development.

While I am a big champion of parachurch organizations, I really want to see local congregations adopt this cause all over this nation. I want worship and social justice to be done in the same building. People coming together across ethnicities and cultural barriers, as well as socioeconomic and class status, to integrate the poor into mainstream society is the image of justice I want to see.

The two sides of justice that I’ve been discussing here both stem from one perspective: What does justice look like for human beings? There’s nothing wrong with that, but it recently occurred to me to turn that question around and ask, What does justice look like from God’s perspective? As I mentioned before, as human beings, we don’t really want justice in its strictest sense—because we would be condemned. But God, who is holy and perfect, has no reason to fear justice. He desires it. According to the Bible, He loves it. Remember those verses I mentioned at the start of the chapter (Ps. 37:28; 140:12; Isa. 30:18; Mic. 6:8)?

In the book of Ruth, Boaz, a rich landowner, didn’t just harvest all of his grain and then give it away, he left some for the poor, like Ruth, to glean. It was an act of grace that allowed Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, to have dignity, to work, not just receive handouts.

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

God has always wanted the vulnerable in society to be cared for. He never intended for them to languish in poverty, abuse, slavery, homelessness, or other types of devastation. When we care for individuals who are trapped in these ways—when we show them love and help them move toward freedom and wholeness—we participate in bringing a little part of God’s kingdom back into alignment with His greater plan. We do justice and God smiles.

Many oppressed people recoil into survival mode, compromising their dignity and just about everything else just to make it from day to day. But accepting a victim status somehow takes a toll on our physical health. I believe that high blood pressure and a poor diet, coupled with this mind-set as an oppressed people, have created the high percentage of American black men who are dying from hypertension and heart disease. People should not disconnect their mental state from their physical well-being.

“God didn’t put anyone on this planet to be a porn star, a prostitute, or a stripper,” Lisa said. “Nobody is just a prostitute. Nobody is just a trafficked victim. Each person is somebody’s daughter.”1 Lisa spoke to my heart. She spoke of dignity—God’s intended dignity for each of us no matter our past, no matter our present. Each one of us is somebody’s son or daughter.

The Language of Shalom,

The oppressor and the oppressed reflect a damaged image of God—and long to express their creativity and dignity in a healthy way. For very different reasons, both the oppressed and the oppressors can be hard to love. But Jesus calls us as His followers to love our enemies and also to care for the downtrodden, whether they are in a concentration camp in Germany or in a halfway house in Jackson, Mississippi. Dignity is worth the fight.

today, they don’t see a group of disciples characterized by love for one another. Instead, they see (and hear) a group of people making a lot of noise about issues—abortion, homosexuality, and other social and political hot topics. It’s not that those things aren’t important—they are very important, and Christians are right to raise issues and take stands. But those things shouldn’t define the church. Human personalities shouldn’t define the church, either. Our Christianity should be defined by Christ—who loved us and gave His earthly life for us—living His everlasting life out through us.

becoming a Christian is discovering God’s love for us, and being a Christian is learning to love God back—and then finding ways to show God’s overflowing love to the people around us.

Israel’s story reveals a great deal about God’s love for us today—how He sent Jesus to redeem us from slavery to sin and how He remains faithful and committed to us even when we fall short in our obedience to—and love for—Him.

I speak often about the ways that we black men have let down our women, children, and communities. Fatherlessness is an epidemic today, and my heart is broken for the women, and especially the children, who have been abandoned, so I plead with men to take responsibility and love their families. Sometimes when I address this subject, women ask me what they can do to confront this failure in our men and strengthen our families and communities. I tell my sisters that, as hurt and disappointed as they may be, the way to bring our men back is to show them deep love as human beings created by God in His image and with inherent dignity. I understand that this is not an easy thing to do, but God calls us to love the people who have hurt us—just as Jesus loved Saul who was persecuting Him.

I understand thr context is women asking what they can do, but the advice given here can still lead to abuse. Men still need accountsbility to a standard

In the same way, we are called to love those who sin against us, even if we must sacrifice something to do so.

Not helpful in marriage context. Men are to love their wife as christ loved the church. That must be said

I’ve noticed something interesting about my “enemies” as I’ve gone through life: I often learn from them. Many times, when people cut me down, there’s some bit of truth in what they say—and if I can hear that truth, I may be able to grow and do better in my service to God. When that happens, I’m grateful for my enemies. Maybe I even love them a little bit for helping me become a better Christian. Jesus may have had that idea in His mind when He told us to love our enemies, but I think mostly He just meant for us to do it, whether or not we see any benefit in it. The real advantage for us, of course, is that the more we practice loving the people who are hard for us to love, the more we reflect Jesus’s character and build our “grace muscles” so we can respond in an even more Christlike manner the next time.

On the same day as the JSU demonstrations, Connie Slaughter, one of my attorneys, had taken Goon Jones’s deposition in regard to my case. She had the chance to cross-examine him. In many ways, the shooting probably seemed like payback for him. Having a black woman ask him all those questions and accuse him of lying—it was basically unthinkable at the time, and the shootings at JSU probably seemed like an opportunity for him to once again assert his dominance and place in society. Goon Jones retired from the state highway patrol to run for Simpson County sheriff, a position he held for nineteen years. He beat us up, and it made him more popular.

It seems to me that we have a limited and distorted idea of love. Somehow we’ve developed the mind-set that to love one person or group, we have to hate another person or group. So we direct our love toward the groups we’re part of—our families, our denominations, our political parties, our ethnic groups—and feel free to hate anyone outside of these boxes. We may not hate them individually, but we hate them collectively. We condemn people for not belonging to the same groups we belong to—we look down on them for not thinking like us, worshiping like us, voting like us, or looking like us. Maybe we justify this behavior because we think the other group is wrong about God. Jesus doesn’t let us get away with that though. He taught that even being angry with someone else was like murder—and it made the angry person subject to judgment (see Matt. 5:21–22).

I am extremely interested in the rights of the unborn, but my passion for life does not stop when a baby emerges from his or her mother’s womb. I believe God wants us to be concerned for every life, including the lives of our young black men in jail, Mexican immigrants (legal or not) living in America, gay men and women, and so many others—saints and sinners!

I give the state the responsibility of managing immigration, and I take responsibility for showing love.

When segregation became illegal, the same thing happened in Jackson that happened all over the country: the white people fled to the suburbs as black people started moving in.

we’ve missed a genuine understanding of God’s message. It is, very simply, His love for us, and the power He gives us to love one another.

To build a system that accommodates the oppression of anyone is wrong.

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). Those who exercise hatred and oppression have distanced themselves from God and are in a position of grave need.

He possessed those special qualities of leadership that gave him the vision to transform what is into what ought to be. Not what ought to be just for ourselves, but what ought to be better for all of us.

Some people argue that because slavery occurred more than a century ago, asking people to repent again is beating a dead horse. I understand that, but I also look around and see the legacy that slavery has left among black people—how it has damaged our sense of self-worth so severely and how other forms of bondage have risen up to take its place. We haven’t fully exorcised this demon from our national soul. Until we do, our best strategy is to repent. When confession comes out of our mouths, sin is forgiven and room is made for love to come into our hearts. Through love, real change can happen. Creating laws to protect people’s civil rights (and enforcing those laws) can bring about a degree of justice, but true justice will come only as we love one another and consider one another’s needs as important as our own.

The damage that resulted from the old system of segregation has left African Americans in a hard state. The breakup of the family, laws and systems that have kept us from flourishing, redlining in housing developments, and so many other lasting effects of segregation make it so much easier for a black man to rob or hurt an innocent white person without much thought because of the damage that has been done. On the other side, the damage done to white people from centuries of racism makes it easier for them to avoid living in black neighborhoods, fear black people walking the streets, or even commit vicious hate crimes against blacks. The lasting guilt and lingering fears of racism cause people to view those who are different as being almost subhuman, rather than seeing them as children of God created in His image. This is why we talk past one another when racial incidents flare. This is why we ignore other people’s stories or perspectives. This is why we always react defensively first, instead of humbly listening to and trying to understand the other side of the story.

But there is a better way. There is the way of Jesus Christ, shown to us on the cross—the most humble and grace-filled act there ever was. Due to our redemption, we have an obligation to forgive and accept the forgiveness of others. In forgiving and being forgiven, the healing process begins for both parties involved. Our acknowledgment of mistreatment and hurt is healthy for us; it’s good for others too.

You have to be a bit of a dreamer to imagine a world where love trumps hate—but I don’t think being a dreamer is all that bad. Joel prophesied that God would “pour out [His] Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (Joel 2:28). I’m an old man, and this is one of my dreams: that my descendants will one day live in a land where people are quick to confess their wrongdoing and forgive the wrongdoing of others and are eager to build something beautiful together.

Bible teaching is hearing God speak in prayer, obeying it, and then trying to put it into practice.

The way I’ve come to define prayer is that it is seeking and listening for the voice of God in relationship to His will.

Prayer is not a substitute for action; it is a preparation for action.

In fact, most of John’s warnings had to do with money—and the just handling of money. He told tax collectors not to collect more than they were due, and he told soldiers not to extort. He was able to shine a light on how the Pharisees had allowed their love of money to infect their religion. He showed himself as a prophet who understood God’s justice and redemptive love for humanity.

We know God holds the future in His hands, and His plans and purposes are working themselves out, but that does not mean Christians are just passive observers.

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). If these called-out people are going to proclaim God’s intentions and be faithful witnesses to the plan God has for our lives, then the people of the church have to live lives that mirror Jesus.

intentional communities seeking to reflect God’s kingdom.

Our care for the poor stops looking like a handout and starts looking like the way we care for family members and those we love. We start trying to find ways to get people jobs, to get people good educations, and to provide opportunities that they might not otherwise have. We start getting more creative in the way we approach mission.

The fullness and adequacy of the gospel is a message of togetherness and love across ethnic barriers. Churches that understand the fullness of the gospel and the greatness of God will serve people best. It’s also important to understand that our problems are always multifaceted. Areas such as economics, behavior, family, and customs all stop us at the door to truth, when in reality, we should view these in light of God’s justice.

This is perhaps the strongest form of community, a group of people who tell one another the truth.

The church today has lost that sense of urgency. We have slipped into a complacency that often causes us to put off for tomorrow the tasks that should be done today. Paul told us to be watchful, to be on our guard. He said when Jesus comes back, it will be like a thief coming in the night. If we truly believed we were living in the last days, our churches would look much different; they would look a lot more like the one we read about in the book of Acts.

My hope and my dream is that the recent events in cities like Ferguson, Missouri; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Dallas, Texas, and the subsequent stories of violence and the devaluing of human life will spur people on toward change. I’m hoping that as the church ponders the crisis in the Middle East and all that groups like ISIS are doing, they will offer an alternative—a better response that draws people into the deep love of Christ, rather than the hands of hatred and killing. I’m hoping the church will remember that our repentance still hasn’t been deep enough. I am hoping we will wake up and start confessing our sins, learning to be humble before God. Perhaps the great joy that comes with redemption and the promise that Jesus Christ has defeated death will give us the energy and courage to do just that.