Renè Padilla

John Perkins

Another example of integral mission among the poor is the ministry of Black American John Perkins, which he started with his wife Vera Mae as early as 1960 with The Voice of Calvary in Mendenhall, Mississippi, and has extended to many places, especially in the United States, through the John M. Perkins Foundation and the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA, formed in 1989). At a time when the large majority of Evangelical Christians assumed that the mission of the church could be defined exclusively in terms of evangelism as the oral communication of the gospel and the planting of churches, John’s ground breaking writings were of great encouragement and inspiration to Christians (including me) who were looking for a more holistic and

biblical view of the Christian mission. 4 He synthesizes his missionary strategy for the church to respond to urban poverty in three words, “the three Rs,” as he calls them: relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution.

Relocation: Faithfulness to the gospel implies the same kind of special concern for the poor that characterized Jesus Christ’s ministry. He is our model, and his followers are called to reproduce his incarnation by identifying themselves with the weak, the afflicted, the oppressed. Only by doing that—from within the situation of the poor—will they be able to feel the needs of the poor, understand the true causes of poverty, and find ways to help.

Reconciliation: Poverty is oftentimes closely related to racism and ethnocentrism. As a Black man he suffered mistreatment and violence on the part of White people, including the police. That is the price that Black people have to pay to live in a southern state of the United States. As a human being, he was inclined

4 On John Perkins’s background as a boy who grew up in utter poverty, and his own story of how he initiated and, under God, was able to develop The Voice of Calvary, see With Justice for All (Ventura, California: Regal

Books, 1982). This book provides the author’s strategy to implement his missiology previously presented in Let Justice Roll Down (Ventura, California: Regal Books, new ed., 2006). Translated into Spanish and published in Buenos Aires by Nueva Creación in 1988, Justicia para todos has been very useful in planting the seed of integral mission all over Latin America.

Feature Renè Padilla

27 to respond to hate with hate, but God dealt with him and he understood that the

Whites are victims of their own racism and that both Black and White need to be liberated from racial hatred through the gospel of reconciliation. The gospel of reconciliation became an integral part of The Voice of Calvary.

Redistribution: There is plenty of food in the world for every person to be properly fed, and yet there are hundreds of millions of hungry people around the world. The root problem is not lack of food but inequity in the distribution of it. This lack of equity affects not only the distribution of food but all aspects of social life. What is urgently needed, therefore, is a redistribution of resources based on the recognition on the part of the rich that what they have does not belong to them—that they are called to be stewards responsible before God, who is a God of justice, to share their resources, not just their goods but also their knowledge, skills, and technology with the poor. Furthermore, they need to recognize that the poor are imprisoned by the oppressive economic system that originally caused their poverty, and that the way to break the oppression is by creating free enterprises organized as cooperatives, not for the enrichment of a few but for the common good.

Christian and Christine Schneider

A much more recent example of the Christian response to the challenge posed by the city is the ministry that Christian Schneider, a primary school teacher from Basel, Switzerland, started in the slums of Manila in 1988, a few years before he married

Christine, a nurse, also from Basel. 5 An outstanding feature of their account of their ministry is the openness with which they describe to their reactions to what they see or experience. To illustrate this point, here is a quotable snapshot:

The North American missionary group was an impressive discovery. Most of the

40 foreign colleagues lived in complete American luxury in the heavily guarded areas of the city. The work in the streets, in the prisons, and the nursing homes was performed by 160 Filipinos…. The Filipino helpers were poverty stricken

5 Cf. Christian and Christine Schneider, Rubble and Redemption: Finding Life in the Slums of Manila (Carlisle, Coimbrta, U.K., 2002). Editors’ note: Rubble and Redemption will be reviewed in the November 2013 edition

of New Urban World.

NEW URBAN WORLD

although educated, which one could recognize by their English language skills. They took me with them in their visits to the prisons, to the youthful gangs and street children, and to the red-light districts, where they ran a tea room at night. What I experienced there shocked me to my depths. Need existed in Basel and London too, but Manila was in a different league. Children and entire families literally lived in the streets, in the dirt. For the first time I encountered people who were forced to suffer real hunger and humiliation, who were ignored by society, or who were maltreated as underpaid workers and were forced to fight for their right to life on a daily basis. I saw child labor, beggars, and prostitution. Earlier, I seemed to have suppressed that there were people who actually physically suffered from hunger. That didn’t fit in my theology. This encounter with the poor almost cost me my belief in a merciful God. 6

During their time living with the poor, the Schneiders make themselves available to fill the gap whenever and wherever a gap appears and they are able to fill it, be it by building a therapeutic community for the rehabilitation of drug addicts, or for street children, or for prostitutes. By doing so they show that God is love and that he has a special concern for the poor.

One of the values of the Schneiders’ presentation is its emphasis on the personal relationships that they maintain with a wide variety of poor people that they know by name and that they learn to love and respect. Not all the people that they try to help are able to break away from the vicious circle of poverty that they find themselves in, oftentimes without having anyone else to blame other than themselves. By the time the Schneiders return to their home country after over nine years in Manila, however, they can rejoice that the seeds they planted continue to bear fruit. Back in Switzerland, they continue to support Onésimo, the service organization that they formed and that is now under local leadership.