“That’s enormous progress, and it’s the sort of thing that John’s influence has helped to create,” Sider said.
In the 1990s, after returning to Jackson, Perkins founded the Spencer Perkins Center, named for his son who died suddenly in 1998 after suffering a heart attack at the age of 44. The center focused, as had other ministries of his father, on evangelism, affordable housing and helping poor children and families.
The elder Perkins has summed up his life’s work and learnings in what he calls his “manifesto,” a trilogy of books that concluded with the publication in September of “Count It All Joy: The Ridiculous Paradox of Suffering.”
In the book, Perkins recounts some of the tragedies he has faced but talks of suffering as a part of faith, rather than a failure of it.
“This is the message that I want to leave as a witness to the next generation,” he writes in the introduction. “It’s not only given that we should believe on God, but that we should suffer for His namesake.”
Shane Claiborne, co-founder of Red Letter Christians and who has known and worked with Perkins for more than 20 years, said Perkins has long demonstrated “ministry of presence.”
Claiborne said Perkins’ approach to Bible study, whether early in the morning at CCDA conferences or online on YouTube and Facebook, is symbolic of the way he has lived his life.
“Almost everything that John does is collaborative,” said Claiborne, who co-wrote with him the 2009 book “Follow Me to Freedom: Leading and Following as an Ordinary Radical,” and has joined Perkins in an online Bible study, as has megachurch pastor Rick Warren and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson.
Participants “might not have all the same theological assumptions, but they’ve got some wisdom he wants them to share and they’re his friends,” Claiborne said.
A large group prays around John Perkins during the Mosaix conference on Nov. 7, 2019, in Keller, Texas. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks
Perkins has been trying to build co-laborers rather than view himself as the only one to emulate.
“My dad, he has a hard time with people thinking that he is this person that people should be following,” Priscilla Perkins, co-president of her parents’ foundation, said as the Nov. 1 online Bible study came to a close. “No, it’s Christ that we’re following, so we want to make sure that everybody knows that.”
Over the last two decades, institutions of higher learning such as evangelical Calvin University and historically Black Jackson State University have recognized her father with a program, or with a scholarship named in honor of Perkins and his wife, Vera Mae.
John and Vera Mae Perkins in an undated image. Photo courtesy of the John and Vera Mae Perkins Foundation
Seattle Pacific University has had a John Perkins Center since 2004 and has held trainings, lectures and a day of service for incoming students in hopes of moving them from charitable to community development activities.
