Featured Ministry The Alban Institute builds up congregations and their leaders to be agents of grace and transformation to shape and heal the world through publishing, workshops, online activities, education, consulting, research etc. More Current Articles in Holistic Ministry: • Desmond Tutu Announces Retirement by Al Tizon • Nonviolence in an Age of Terrorism by Al Tizon • To the Foul-Mouthed, I Became Foul-Mouthed in Order to Win Them by Al Tizon • Edinburgh 1910: 100 Years Worth of Changes by Al Tizon

This edition of "Classic Holistic" features an excerpt from John Perkins' A Quiet Revolution, where he outlines for the first time the principles of Christian community development and reconciliation. [read]

            We need a quiet revolution!

            To me, our legitimacy and our identity as the church of Jesus Christ is wrapped up in our response to the victim in our world.  As one author put it, "The gospel to the poor and the concept of the church are inseparably linked.  Failure to minister to the poor testifies to more than unfulfilled responsibility; it witnesses to a distorted view of the church."

            If the church is to be the quiet revolution, it must face the poor in our society.

            But how?  Many of our communities are in a state of decay.  And that decay threatens all America through crime, the rising cost of welfare, and the increased economic pressures the poor create.  Traditional Christian and secular strategies have not worked in developing these communities because they have relied too heavily on cultural values rather than a sincere compassion for those living in them.  Evangelism could be part of the answer.  Social action could be part of the answer.  But 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 and welfare.  We Christians have for the most part lost the sense of power that comes from being the Body of Christ.

            The longer we worked in the community of Mendenhall, the more God unfolded to us the real power of the Body, that it's not just a group.  As Christians coming together, cemented by our central unifying commitment to Christ, we began to see how we could be transformed into corporate power, how we could corporately give our lives in the direction of evangelizing or economic development or relieving human need or justice and make a difference.

            We must relearn what it means to be a body and what it means to continue Christ's ministry of preaching the gospel to the poor.  I believe there is a strategy to do this.  We have seen three principles work that seem to be at the heart of how a local body of Christians can affect their neighborhood.  We call them the three "R's" of the quiet revolution: relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution.

            First, we must relocate the Body of Christ among the poor and in the area of need.  I'm not talking about a group of people renting a storefront through which to provide services to the community.  I'm talking about some of us people voluntarily and decisively relocating ourselves and our families for worship and for living within the poor community itself.  William and Ruth Bentley, for instance, are leaders in the National Black Evangelical Association.  Both are professionals.  But instead of fleeing to the suburbs [sic], they live over a storefront in a Chicago ghetto, where they pastor a church.  That's relocation!

            If we are going to be the Body of Christ, shouldn't we be like he was when he came in history?  He didn't commute daily from heaven to earth to minister to us poor sinners.  He didn't set up his own nice mission compound.  No, the Bible says that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace truth" (John 1:14).  That's how we were able to behold his glory, because he dwelt among us.

            And people will behold us and give glory to God if we dwell among them.  In all of our stumblings at Voice of Calvary, I look back on this one principle and see how all the rest of what has happened has come out of it.  From the beginning we were committed to living with the people in the same place they lived.  In fact, we cut off all the other alternatives.  Of course, like I said, there were times when I wanted to leave Mendenhall-but I couldn't.  I was trapped, thank the Lord.

            A living involvement with people turns poor people from statistics into our friends.  I am not willing to lay down my life for a statistic.  But I am more willing to lay down my life for my friends.  Again, Jesus is our model.

            One way this worked is with my kids, who experienced the same educational system that all the other kids we worked with had to go through.  So my commitment in ministry to the education of children in the neighborhood was also a commitment to my own kids.  I could not raise the educational level of my own children without dealing with the problems facing all the children in Mendenhall.

            Relocating myself makes me accountable to the real needs of the people because they become my needs.  A person ministering from within the neighborhood or community will know and be able to start with the real needs of those around them instead of forcing on the people what he or she has assumed their needs are.  After meeting some real needs, you can begin to communicate through these "felt needs" to the deeper spiritual needs of a person.

            When this happens the quiet revolution has begun.

            Then we must reconcile ourselves across racial and cultural barriers.  I hear people today talking about the black church and the white church.  I do it too-it's reality.  But it's not in Scripture.  We should not settle for the reality our culture presents us with.

            You see, the whole idea of the love of God was to draw people together in one body-reconciled to God.  That's supposed to be the glory of the church!  But we aren't manifesting the love of God today that can really move across racial and cultural barriers.  What we do is to go on preaching the gospel within the limits of our own culture and tradition.

            The test of the gospel in the early days of the church was how was it going to effect Samaria.  I believe the gospel is being tested again today.  To reconcile people across racial lines, black people, white people, all people, is to stage a showdown between the power of God and the depth of the damage in us as human beings.  It's been my experience that the power of God wins and the result is a dynamic witness for Jesus Christ that brings others to confront him in their lives.

            When reconciliation is taking place across cultural lines-between blacks and whites, between rich and poor, between indigenous and those who are new in the community-the quite revolution is ready to spread.

            The final result is redistribution.  If the blood of injustice is economics, we must as Christians seek justice by coming up with means of redistributing goods and wealth to those in need.  How well a ministry can begin the process of creating a stable economic base in the community determines the motivation of that ministry.  Is it simply "charity?"  Or is it really trying to develop people and to allow them to begin to determine their own destinies?  It also determines the long-range effectiveness of a body's commitment to a neighborhood.  For without an economic base there will never be a launching pad for ministry.  A ministry in the poor community which has no plans to create economic support systems in the community is no better than the federal government's programs which last only as long as outside funds are budgeted.  The long-term goal must be to develop a sense of self-determination and responsibility within the neighborhood itself.

            It's at the point of redistribution that I begin to see a possibility for structural change to take place.  What we need is a change created by Jesus Christ in our institutional behavior equal to the change that can occur in the life of an individual.  And as we commit ourselves to just redistribution in terms of creating a new economics in broken communities, we can see how Jesus, through us, offers himself.  The Body of Christ becomes the corporate model through which we can live out creative alternatives that can break the cycles of wealth and poverty which oppress people.

            When this happens, the quiet revolution is winning the battle for the community.

            If we take principles like these three "R's" and share them with our churches and reorient our bodies' objectives around them, I believe something wonderful would happen.  I believe that the church and hopeful movements within the church will be turned face to face with the victims in our midst.  I believe it would mean new life for the church.

            I don't believe everyone in a middle-class, suburban church, black or white, will move to the ghetto.  But I do believe that a body with these priorities will see itself totally mobilized for taking the battle of the gospel to the ghetto or any neighborhood of need.  There will be the shock troops, the infantry who will be there in person.  But there will also be the support troops, organizing the resources so desperately needed.

            This would mean blessings of reconciliation across racial and cultural barriers, both for the "old" church and for those participating in developing a "beachhead."  There will be the blessings of associating with the people for whom God has claimed a special love, the unique blessings of considering the poor (Luke 6:20, Ps. 41:1, Job 19:11-17).

            And there will be the blessings of seeing God complete the love and faith which he has put within us.  Just like John 3:16 is God's loving response to humanity, so 1 John 3:16-18 is the completion of that love in us as we reach out to others.

            And there will be the blessings of fulfilled promises, like the one in Proverbs 29:13-"The poor man and the oppressor meet together; the Lord gives light to the eyes of both."

            And I believe that if we follow principles like these into the black communities, into the poor rural areas, into the slums, then we will see the hopeful movements in the church take on real meaning in the lives of our people.

            As we, by faith, were led from one work of ministry to another in Mendenhall, God's equipping hand ignited our concern through education and health care and cooperatives; ignited our sense of Christian community with returning leadership and developing disciples; ignited our gifts of evangelism, preaching, teaching, our gifts of service and wisdom.  It was like lighting one corner of a pinwheel on the fourth of July.  The fire spread to the others until the wheel was spinning.  All our works of evangelism, social action, economic development, and justice were on fire, turning and burning around the pivotal priority of preaching the gospel to the poor.

            This could happen in towns and cities across the rest of the country-wherever Christians and needs exist together.  What if the dynamic movements of the church today were ignited among people, preaching and doing the gospel with a special concern for the poor?  I believe what we would see would be a church ministering to the hearts, bodies, minds, spirits of men and women, merging together in a unified ring of fire, like a pinwheel in motion, spreading the light of liberty, shining the light of justice throughout the land.

[from John Perkins, A Quiet Revolution (Waco: Word, 1976), pp. 217-221]