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Perkins had never thought much of religion. "It was hard for me to see how all that shouting and bench turning I saw in black churches was giving people any kind of incentive to develop," he recounts in his autobiography, Let Justice Roll Down. But his oldest son, Spencer, began to attend a neighborhood church and talked his parents into going. After considerable investigation—Bible reading, particularly—Perkins accepted Christ. Soon he was using every minute of his free time to study the Bible, teach Bible classes, or witness to his faith.

In 1960, he took his family back to Mississippi, intending to start a Bible ministry. While offering Bible classes in still-segregated public schools and other venues, though, he found that Bible ministry had to be bigger than he had planned. Living out the gospel meant changing lives, and that involved changing the community.

Though leery of some aspects of the civil-rights movement, Perkins began to register voters, trying to influence local elections. That brought threats and opposition from the white community. Perkins helped organize co-ops throughout the South. He launched a health clinic. When local black churches kept a distance from his ministry, he started a church of his own. At one point, after he led a boycott of local white businesses, police arrested and badly beat him.

Perkins depended on support from conservative Christians back in Southern California, who found it hard to understand how a ministry of Bible teaching and evangelism had become a source of political agitation and violence. Through trial and error, he developed a philosophy of ministry to the poor, and in the process of explaining it to supporters and volunteers, he boiled the philosophy down to three points.

The philosophy of the "Three R's"—reconciliation, relocation, and redistribution—is CCDA's backbone. Reconciliation shows itself as multiracial ministry. Perkins has never flirted with black power rhetoric or Afrocentric philosophies. He firmly believes that the kingdom of God is seen when all ethnicities work and worship together. "I want to preach a gospel that is stronger than my race and stronger than my economic interest," he says. At the CCDA conference, his close friendship with Wayne Gordon, a white inner-city pastor from Chicago's tough Lawndale neighborhood, sets the example.

The second R, relocation, emphasizes that to work with the poor you have to live with them. "I believe that the people with the problems can solve their own problems," Perkins says. Only those who share daily life in the ghetto can move past charity to genuine community development.

This challenges up-and-out inner-city residents just as much as suburbanites. CCDA members don't consider it a success when local young people go off to college and graduate to suburban life. "What they have got is a better education in consumption," Perkins says. CCDA champions educated young people who come back to serve in their communities.

Living in the community, Wayne Gordon stresses, is the only cure for the prejudice that middle-class whites typically bring to their relations with the poor. He tells of moving into the high-crime area of Lawndale as a young teacher and coming home to find his van broken into. Residents of his building saw the theft and organized an around-the-clock vigil to make sure no one looted the van further. They took care of him even though he was the only white man in the neighborhood. "I found that, unexpectedly, I was living out the words of Martin Luther King Jr., being judged not by the color of my skin but by my character," Gordon says.

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March 2007, Vol. 51, No. 3