It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I’m a big fan of John Perkins. He’s one of my favorite go-to guys for all things community development, civil rights, racial reconciliation and urban ministry. Last week I read one of his more recent books, Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community, which he co-wrote with Charles Marsh, a religion professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. By way of introduction, Perkins is black, Marsh is white, and the book is about “beloved community” — the guiding vision for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement in the American South where both Marsh and Perkins grew up. I’m not sure I’m entirely qualified to do that vision justice, but I understand it to be more or less the vision King articulates in his timeless “I Have A Dream” speech.

Marsh is a scholar of the Civil Rights movement, Perkins is a veteran of it, and their thesis is that what kept the Civil Rights movement grounded and creative and redemptive was its roots in the Christian faith. Marsh writes:

The Civil Rights movement teaches us that faith is authentic when it stays close to the ground. And it reminds us of faith’s essential affirmations: showing hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the dignity of created life; reclaiming the ideals of love, honesty and truth; embracing the preferential option of nonviolence; and practicing justice and mercy… Only as long as the Civil Rights movement remained anchored in the church — in the energies, convictions and images of the biblical narrative and the worshiping community — did the movement have a vision.

At some point after the assassination of King, the movement lost touch with its roots, they say, and that’s when it splintered and degenerated. They want to call us back to the roots of the movement and consider what it can teach us about a twenty-first century embodiment of that vision of beloved community. A big part of that is understanding Christian discipleship through the lens of reconciliation — reconciliation between people and God, and reconciliation among people across various boundaries, including race.

Perkins asserts that poverty and racism are interrelated, and are in fact part of a bigger web of social breakdown, with individual, family and community issues all at play. And the church, he says, needs to step up:

The issue we’re facing is the broken family and the broken community. It really is a single issue. The community is broken because families are broken, and families can’t get back together because the community is broken. This is why family values and social justice aren’t separate issues. The health of the community depends on the health of the family and the health of the family depends on the justice of the community. If the church is going to offer good news in our time, we have to give some alternative to the broken family and broken community that reflect the desperation of our culture… If the gospel of reconciliation is going to interrupt the brokenness in society, our churches are going to have to rethink their vocation… A community where men stand in the rain to beg is broken. There is no peace in that city. It’s that man’s problem, but it’s also our community’s problem. We’ve got to do something to make good work possible for healthy people like him. What does the church have to offer a community where healthy men beg on the street corner?

What indeed?

I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic system of our culture without question. We assume that people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings.

All in all, the book is a pretty quick read, but it’s deep, because it gets at the very roots of that which stands in the way of reconciliation, and it’s cause for some soul searching among evangelicals, I think. I hope and pray that my tribe will become known as true ambassadors of reconciliation and that we’ll get to experience some of that beloved community too.