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I wrote this 26 years ago, in 2000, about Dr. John Perkins.
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In the spring of 1990, Dr. John Perkins offered me a two-year internship working with him. He was the on-the-move founder of half a dozen community development ministries around the country. It was an opportunity many sought, and I was interested in it. Deep down, however, I wanted more. I grew up fatherless, and I wanted a Christian father. Not just a father figure, or role model, or mentor, but an actual father. It was a personal need, an emotional and psychological hunger, that shaped my moods and bent my will. I imagined he could fill that father-shaped hole.
I admired Dr. Perkins greatly. The previous summer, I had visited Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson, Mississippi, as a volunteer with a work group, and I was amazed by what I saw. Christians were marrying an evangelical, Jesus-saves gospel message with tangible social action. Dr. Perkins was not afraid to talk about race, economics, politics, social justice, or anything else that was shunned by the conservative evangelical circles I was raised in. He was my hero. So as I negotiated the opportunity to live with and serve my hero as his personal ghostwriter, I also dreamed of feeling close to a father, receiving his love, glowing in his approval.
Dr. Perkins failed miserably.
He didn’t want to hear how I felt, he just wanted me to do. He was emotionally unavailable. When I asked him to pray with me about my issues, he prayed instead about the work to accomplish. He regarded my bouts of depression as wasteful introspection, navel-gazing. He rarely asked how I was doing. When he sought me out, it was because he had a task for me.
But one day I shook my head and, like Nebuchadnezzar, was restored to my right mind. Dr. Perkins never promised to be a father. He never said he would be part of my inner healing. He never indicated that he would hold me close as a son. My perspective was warped, I was tripping, and I had misinterpreted the whole situation. Our relationship greatly improved when I quit expecting him to be my replacement father.
The irony is that, ten years later, I think about him every day.
At least once before the sun sets, I think WWJPD: What would John Perkins do?
I didn’t plan it this way. It just happened, it being the confluence of responsibilities, pressures, decisions-to-be-made, and visions to execute that drives my days. I’m a co-director of a nonprofit organization and am a spoke in the wheel of various national initiatives. Every day I am challenged to think outside the box, to innovate, to give a fresh spin to ancient truth. I reference the innovators I admire, and he’s always there.
Yet he’s no mere mentor. When I travel the country, meet the big shots, walk the urban community, and read the Harambee balance sheet, I feel Dr. Perkins’s presence. It makes me feel secure. It gives me confidence. It helps me forgive myself. The man lives in Mississippi, and I live in California, so I see him maybe twice a year for short stretches. But he had an emotional and psychological impact on me by the way he taught urban ministry, letting me live it with him.
Dr. Perkins’s relational approach to teaching urban ministry life principles meant he was not formal in his training. We didn’t have training sessions. We didn’t read book chapters and discuss them. We did not exegete popular films. Bible study was not inductive and more devotional than systematic.
What he did do was make me walk with him. We walked down the street, into churches, in the halls of power, and into the homes of our neighbors.
Often I was carrying books.
Together we wrote letters, planned budgets, and raised money.
All the while, he explained what he was thinking.
One thing he said over and over was that the people with the problem should take first responsibility to solve the problem. Don’t wait for the government, the church, the schools, the white man, or anybody to do something for you. You are going to be waiting a long time, blaming others, and in the end, you will have accomplished nothing.
Throughout my first year with him, Dr. Perkins repeated that message over and over. I think that was his way of counseling me in my depression. Every man believes the burden he carries is the greatest, and so did I. At seven years old, I was without mother or father. All my life, all through college at Biola and Stanford, I felt like a weed out of the ground. Who cares if a weed withers and disappears? It was difficult to imagine my future. In my heart, I wanted someone to come and claim me, give me a vision, tell me what to do. My soul was on hold.
One day, however, high on a mountain in Puebla, Mexico, I snapped out of it.
That day, I encountered a Mexican poem that says, “Caminante no hay camino/Se hace camino al andar.” Translation: “Sojourner, there is no road/You make the road as you walk.” Dr. Perkins had been saying this all along: Make the road as you walk. Why that Mexican poem got through to me when all the Chicano poetry and literature I had read didn’t is something I’ll chalk up to the Holy Spirit. But I’ll chalk up to Dr. Perkins the fact that I ever read the Mexican poem: I was in Puebla because Dr. Perkins had been invited to speak at a World Vision conference, and he chose to pay my airfare himself so that I could walk in the clouds with him.
Perhaps more intimate than all the walking we did together were the things he let me watch. In this regard, I am no different than anyone else Dr. Perkins knows or has discipled. He lives his life transparently, expecting to be watched, understanding that values are often caught rather than taught. In four years as his assistant, there are quirky yet poignant details.
One spring, Dr. Perkins, another staff member, and I were holed up in a mountain cabin writing his next book. Dr. Perkins began to sob loudly. He cried with that HAW HAW HAW of an 11-year-old boy whose feelings are tender, but his chest is getting bigger.
He rambled on about a Mr. Buckley, whom he fully expects to see in heaven and to whom he must give account for his life.
“If I cheat someone, if I hurt someone, if I’m greedy and selfish, what am I going to say to Mr. Buckley?”
HAW, HAW, HAW.
Later, I found out that Mr. Buckley was the old Black man who took Dr. Perkins under his wing when Dr. Perkins first moved to his rural Mississippi town in 1960. Mr. Buckley, the enduring conscience of the Jim Crow South, prayed for justice all his life and gave freely to Dr. Perkins in hopes that Dr. Perkins would give himself to people in need.
Another time, Dr. Perkins and I were sharing a room in a ritzy Manhattan hotel, compliments of the hotel’s owner, who attended a church where Dr. Perkins spoke. Around four in the morning, I walked into the bathroom for a drink of water, only to find Dr. Perkins sitting there, clothes on, with the newspaper scattered on the floor and his Bible opened to the Old Testament. When he saw I was awake, he began chattering about the day’s schedule.
Back in Pasadena, we twentysomething employees would gather around the conference table for Harambee staff meetings. Dr. Perkins would be explaining an equation: “Energy + Intelligence + Character = Leadership.” Or was it, “Motivation + Perspiration + Creativity = Innovation”? No matter. He worked us so hard, we believed he really meant, “Servitude + Jump To It + Don’t Complain = Work All Night Without Appreciation.”
There is more to Dr. Perkins than these stories, but they provide a taste of what he has taught me.
Everyone needs to be afraid to answer to someone. It helps us stay accountable.
You never stop doing your homework, and it’s better to do it early than late.
And now I’m the one giving speeches about “Energy + Innovation + Character = Funding For Next Year” and “Blaming Others + Waiting To Be Told + Bad Attitude = You’re Fired.”
Like hundreds of other people, I had a front-row seat to Dr. John Perkins’s life.
I dare suspect that he treated me like he treated others.
Likely, there are others upon whom his imprint lies even deeper.
But it feels like it’s for me.
I wrote this article to elucidate my understanding and feelings on the printed page. But I’m at a loss. It’s not accurate to say Dr. Perkins is my father, my replacement father, or my father figure. There are plenty of times when I’ve avoided him, plenty of things he does that I disagree with, and lots of time that passes between our discussions. I don’t consult him for much at all. In addition, I feel fatherly presences from many different men.
But I remember him.
More than any man I have ever known, I remember him.
When I write that I remember him, I feel my own HAW, HAW, HAW rising. What do you call a man like that?
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