An Army of Normal Folks - The Christian Leader Who Challenged The Left And Right (And Maybe You)

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

After surviving poverty, racism, violence, and a near-fatal beating, John Perkins chose a path few people ever would: forgiveness. This Shop Talk explores the life of one of America's most influential Christian leaders and his radical vision for building what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the beloved community."Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody. It's Bill Courtney with an Army and normal folks. Welcome into the shop. Hi, Alex. Hello, Bill. Welcome in. How you doing? I actually have, is it 106? Is that our number? You do have a 106? Yeah. Cicero was born in the year 106. Now, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Cicero was born in the year 106. Well, let's see if we keep running out things, we can just find out who was born in. I know. It's really hard, though. Like, that's what I've seen. I was looking at you're 104 and 105. Like, like, I mean, it's not, the documentation is not at those same levels today. Or it's just like really arcane things that you and I in the audience would have no idea what we're talking about. We may need to start over with like 1A.

No, we're going to do this. Okay, 106. All right, here we go. Oh, did we talk about getting merch yet? Not this episode. We have another one recently. Well, before we start. Hey, everybody, go to normal folks.

Dot us, click on merch and buy a t-shirt or hat and wear it around so that when people ask you what it is, you can help us, you know, spread the word. How's that? You know, the way I kind of think about it, have you seen that, like, Under Armour, like, really Americana? Yeah. That people wear those shirts. Yeah. Like, it's super patriotic. Like, it's just like that. Like, this is, like, a new identity for Americans as members of an Army of normal folks. I'm saying. Just go. And I mean, we're not making any money off this stuff. It's at zero profit. We're just getting it out there to help kind of grow the brand. So if you're a regular listener, for goodness sakes, go get a T-shirt or out or something, wear it around. All right.

What are we? Shop Talk 106. The Christian leader who challenged the left and the right, and maybe you, right after these brief messages from our general sponsors. Renno mishap? That's embarrassing. You know what's not embarrassing? Using FIG for Home Improvement Loan, a quick, simple, and transparent offer in minutes. Borrow Better with FIG. Visit fig.ca. billions of records sold. Awards, sold out tours. You think that Jonas brothers are satisfied? Nope. It's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at the office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchor Man. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me, right?

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I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. everybody, Bill Courtney, shop talk number 106. Welcome back into the shop. I'm actually, I know a little bit about this. Are you? Yeah, just a little bit.

Yeah. No, I think I've read something about this before. But here we go. And then I may be confused. It's been mentioned in some of our interview preps in the past. Maybe that's right. And then I heard he recently died and I was like, man, we need to do something on him. Oh, here we go.

Shop Talk number 106, the Christian leader who challenged the left and the right. which already I love the title, because you know, I think both sides need to be challenged, and maybe you. By the time John Perkins was 17 years old, he'd already learned a lesson about America that really no child should ever have to learn. His older brother Clyde had gone into town in rural Mississippi to buy groceries when a white police officer shot and killed him in broad daylight. No one was punished. In Jim Crow, Mississippi, a black man's life could disappear without a consequence. John's family feared he would be next, so they put him on a bus to California. He left Mississippi angry, traumatized, and convinced he would never return.

The boy who fled the South would later become one of the most influential Christian voices on racial reconciliation, community development, and what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community. The vision of a society where people reject hatred, pursue justice, and see each other not as enemies or tribes, but as neighbors whose dignity is tied together. But at the time, John Perkins wasn't looking for reconciliation. He was just looking to survive. He'd be born in 1930 in New Hebron, Mississippi during the Great Depression. His mother died when he was a baby from a disease caused by malnutrition. His father abandoned the family. Perkins grew up in deep poverty raised by relatives working as sharecroppers.

He dropped out of school after the third grade to help support the family. That kind of a beginning could harden a man and would harden a man. Instead, something unexpected happened within him. In California, Perkins built a new life. He worked jobs, served in the army during the Korean War, married his wife, Faramay, and eventually started a successful business, but spiritually, he remained restless. Then, in 1957, after his son invited him to church,

John Perkins encountered Christianity in a way he never had before. Not as tradition, not as survival, but as a call to love your neighbor, pursue justice, and restore broken people. And that faith sent them back to Mississippi. Most people who escaped the violence that Jim Crow South never willingly returned. Perkins did. Friends thought he was nuts.

But he believed the gospel demanded something larger than personal safety and comfort. So he returned to one of the poorest and most segregated parts of the country and started doing practical neighborhood work long before phrases like community development became popular. He opened a health clinic. He started job programs. He created businesses. He worked on voter registration and school registration, and he preached relentlessly that Christian faith without justice and reconciliation

was just not Christianity at all. The work came at a brutal cost. In 1970, after helping lead a peaceful protest in Brandon, Mississippi, Perkins was arrested by right officers and beaten so savagely. They ruptured his stomach and damaged his kidneys. officer shoved a fork down his throat and mocked him while he choked on his own blood years later perkins would say the most supernatural moment of his life happened in that jail cell not because the pain stopped not because the hatred did he said he suddenly realized that if hatred consumed him too

then evil would win twice so he forgave them not cheaply not sentimentally but decisively. That moment shaped the rest of his life. John Perkins would go on to write more than a dozen books and become one of the architects of Christian Community Development. In 1989, he co-founded the Christian Community Development Association, or CCDA, helping train generations of pastors, nonprofit leaders, and neighborhood organizers working to restore struggling communities across America. At the center of his teaching, were what he called the three R's, relocation, moving towards suffering instead of away from it, reconciliation, healing racial and social division, and redistribution, ensuring communities had access

to opportunity, resource, and ownership. He challenged Christians not just to donate to struggling neighborhoods, but to live in them, to love their neighbors, to create opportunity, and stay long enough to share both the suffering and the healing. To Perkins, charity alone was never enough. He believed people needed dignity, ownership, and community again and again. He returned to the same idea that Dr. King talked about, the beloved community. Communities where black and white families worshipped together, served together, suffered together, and refused to let hatred or history have the final word. That vision often left him standing in uncomfortable spaces too conservative for some progressives, too outspoken on race for some conservatives, too justice-oriented

for Christians who wanted faith disconnected from social platforms. But, no surprise, Perkins kept going. And over time, his ideas shaped generations of pastors, ministers, churches, and community leaders across America, including well-known ones like Tim Keller. Hundreds of today's neighborhood-based ministries are building on foundations John Perkins helped to lay decades ago. Following his death, this March, at age 95, tributes poured in from pastors, activists, mayors, and former students again and again. People use the same words, humility. courage, reconciliation, dignity. Many didn't first talk about speeches or books. They talked about how he made people feel seen, how he gave them hope, hope that reconciliation was possible without denying justice. Hope that suffering didn't have to harden into cynicism. Hope that neighborhoods

abandoned by systems, still contain dignity, talent, leadership, and image-bearers of God. And perhaps most remarkably hope that love could remain sturdy enough to survive America's deepest wounds. John Perkins never became famous in the way celebrities became famous. But all across America, there are neighborhoods, churches, ministries, and ordinary people whose lives look different because he refused to give hatred the final word. and in a culture, increasingly addicted to outrage and division, his life still asks a difficult question. What would it look like to build a beloved community instead of merely winning arguments?

Yes, I know the story, because I know the story of when the fork was shoved in his throat. I've read about that incident before. and this guy's a hero and shapes a lot of the way I think about things. What would it look like to build a beloved community instead of merely winning arguments? What would it look like to grow an army of normal folks that are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, Jewish, Christian, agnostic, gay, straight, whatever, all respecting one another's human. and seeing talent and possibility and opportunity in the most impoverished neighborhoods we have and the most disenfranchised groups we have, providing access to those people, being too conservative for the progressives and too progressive for the conservatives.

In other words, calling out what's right and wrong, regardless of what you were told was right and wrong on whatever news feed you watch or social media you subscribe to. Yeah, John Perkins was the man. And remember, he did all this with love in his heart after his brother was shot and killed by a white cop in the Jim Crow area in Mississippi, and after he was beaten so badly

that his internal organs were damaged and he choked on his blood from a fork being shoved down his throat. And despite all of that, he did not have. he's an American hero and if we could just follow this man's example of what real servant leadership looks like and about what not given a crap what the political pundits say and just doing the right thing and serving and leading an army of normal folks who've been like this would change the world so another reason I was interested in him is he has influenced a ton of our So like Darren Babcock, like Jim and Linda, Holland's River from Path United, like Festa, like Bob Leptin with Toxic Charity, Joshua Connolly, who's, that episode recently came out, you know, who he's, and a lot of it's also, Bob Mosakowski, I don't know if I said him already, but so many of these people have taken this charge of also living in the inner city, like Joshua, like Bob, like Darren, because of this concept of the beloved community, which was created by Martin Luther King Jr.

but was also really popularized by John Perkins. And I think it's such an ideal for us all to try to live up to, to build the beloved community where there's no hatred, but I also really like the idea of proximity. Like, we are truly living together in a way that isn't happening enough in America right now. He also talks about going to church together, and we've said it before, but one of the greatest sins of our country is that the most segregated day in our country is Sunday.

And if you're a Christian, And you should just think about how blasphemous that really is. And this is the kind of guy that was brave enough that in the 60s and 70s speak up and say it. I wanted for us to interview him. He was kind of too old by the time we started the show. I remember talking about that. Yeah. I would have loved to have met him.

My goodness, I would have loved to have met him. Okay, everybody. Shop Talk number 106, the Christian leader who challenged the left and the right and hopefully you. to maybe just take a half a second, a deep breath, put your preconceived notions aside, and think about what it really means to be a member of the Army of Normal Folks. And I don't know, we should start something called

the John Perkins Society within the Army of Normal Folks. So I don't know, something, the guy's incredible. All right, anything else, Alex? That's it, Bill. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate it review it, share it with friends and on social. Go to NormalFolks. dot us buy some merch, wear a t-shirt.

Look at the service clubs there. Yeah, but wear a hat. When people ask you about it, then say, yeah, this is what it is. Look into the service clubs, join a service club, start a service club. Yeah, if you got ideas for shop talk ideas, email me at bill at normalfokes. And if you got an idea for people to be guest on an army of normal folks, email me the same. We'll take it up.

And if your idea doesn't suck, we'll pick it and we'll give you some merch. That's right. And we will give you some merch. Absolutely right. Okay, everybody, that's it. Shop Talk number 106, the Christian leader who challenged left on the right, and hopefully you too to do all of the things we discussed. Thanks for joining us in the shop. We'll see you next one. Hey, guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called, Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts.

We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but, you know, tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. On Humor Me with Robert Sligo and Friends, we help make you funnier on this episode. My guest's Bob Odenkirk and Kids in the Hall's Bruce McCullough, try and help the Kazoo Kid and Tayson Day be famous again. What if there's an alternate universe show?

where you guys are incredibly popular. Well, and they could travel up the land, doing meet and greets. They're constantly needed at malls. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque.

Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all. embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life?

That is not the look of an innocent man. Is everyone lying to me about who they are? I felt such desperation. I felt it was what I had to do. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.