Calvin’s January Series in July
This summer, Calvin University’s January Series is reaching back into its archives to bring some memorable voices from years past to today’s audiences.
The January Series in July offers rebroadcasts of selected presentations from the university’s long-running January Series. On July 15, the series featured Dr. John M. Perkins’s 2014 presentation, “Love Is the Final Fight: The Life and Legacy of John M. Perkins.”
The rebroadcast came just months after Perkins, a pastor, author, civil-rights leader, and longtime advocate for Christian community development and racial reconciliation, died on March 13, 2026, at the age of 95.
For Perkins, the work of justice and reconciliation became inseparable from his Christian faith.
From Mississippi Poverty to Christian Faith
Born in 1930 in New Hebron, Miss., Perkins grew up in poverty as the son of a sharecropper. His mother died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his grandmother and extended family. His childhood unfolded amid the poverty and racial injustice of the segregated U.S. South. When Perkins was 17, his older brother was killed by a town marshal. Soon afterward, Perkins left Mississippi for California. It might have been the end of his connection with the state. Instead, his eventual conversion to Christianity changed the direction of his life.
While living in California, Perkins encountered Christians whose love made a lasting impression on him. Reflecting on that experience during his 2014 visit to Calvin University, Perkins said those Christians helped him to overcome what he called his “love deficit.”
“They helped me to embrace my God,” he said. “Those people loved me.”
Perkins said he came to believe that the gospel that had transformed him also called him back toward the place he had left behind. In 1960 he and his wife, Vera Mae, returned with their family to Mississippi. There Perkins became involved in evangelism, community development, voter registration, school desegregation, and the civil-rights movement. He helped establish ministries that addressed not only people’s spiritual needs but also some of the material realities of poverty through education, health care, housing, economic development, and other community-based efforts.
His activism also came at great personal cost. In 1970, after participating in civil-rights efforts in Mendenhall, Miss., Perkins was arrested and severely beaten by white law-enforcement officers.
Yet Perkins refused to allow the violence he experienced to have the final word. Instead he made forgiveness and reconciliation the central themes of his ministry.
A Gospel That Reaches the Neighborhood
Over the decades that followed, Perkins became one of the most influential voices in the Christian community-development movement. In 1989 he helped to found the Christian Community Development Association.
His approach to community development became particularly associated with principles sometimes summarized as the “three Rs”: Relocation, Redistribution, and Reconciliation.
Underlying those principles was Perkins’s conviction that Christian ministry requires more than offering assistance from a distance. Christians are called to know their neighbors, listen to them, recognize their gifts, share in their struggles, and work alongside them toward the flourishing of their communities.
For Perkins, community development was therefore not separate from the gospel. It was one way Christians could live out the gospel in places marked by poverty, racism, isolation, and injustice.
His own story helped to shape that conviction. Having experienced poverty firsthand, Perkins understood that struggling communities did not simply need outsiders to arrive with solutions. Lasting change required relationships, local leadership, investment in people, and a commitment to restoring communities from the strengths within the community itself.
And at the center of it all was reconciliation: the conviction that Christ brings people back into right relationship with God and with one another.
“Love Is the Final Fight”
That conviction was evident when Perkins visited Calvin in January 2014.
Speaking on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Perkins reflected on racism, Christian responsibility, and King’s legacy. Following his January Series presentation, he joined Calvin President Michael Le Roy and approximately 170 others in a civil-rights march across the Calvin campus.
During his presentation, Perkins challenged Christians to recognize that racism is not simply a social or political problem but one that contradicts the gospel itself.
“Racism is contradictory to God's purpose of the gospel,” he said. “We don't know the depth of our racism. We need to examine our hearts and look deep down. Jesus came to get rid of that sin, that bigotry, that hatred.”
“We need to be listening to other people,” Perkins said. “Listening is really prayer, and we need to feel another person's pain.” That posture of listening was connected to something even more fundamental: love.
“We need to see sin for what it is and respond in love,” he said. “We become light, and people see our behavior. That's the way it works.”
Perkins’s life poses questions that remain relevant for Christians today: What does it mean to love our neighbors not only in word but also in the places where they live? How might churches invest in the flourishing of their communities rather than simply providing charity from a distance? How can Christians confront racism while pursuing genuine reconciliation? And what might happen when the gospel moves beyond the walls of the church and into the life of the neighborhood?
For Perkins, those questions ultimately circled back to the gospel: the good news of Jesus. As the title of his 2014 presentation reminds listeners, “Love Is the Final Fight.”
On July 22, the January Series in July is featuring an archived talk by Dr. Erik Carter: Incomplete Without You: The Church and People with Disabilities.
