What Love Creates Through the Faithful
For everyone still doing the costly work and wondering if it's worth it
In 1970, Rev. John Perkins drove to the jail in Brandon, Mississippi, to bail out a group of young civil rights volunteers who had been arrested after a traffic stop following a demonstration. Instead, the officers arrested him. Over the next several hours, they beat him with a blackjack, bent the tines of a fork and shoved it up his nose, and - when word came that the FBI was on its way - made him mop up his own blood before anyone arrived to see it.
He suffered a heart attack during the ordeal and later had two-thirds of his stomach removed because of severe ulcers that developed in its aftermath.
After months of recovery, Perkins remained in Mississippi. He returned to the work in Mendenhall and kept building - health clinics, thrift stores, housing cooperatives, and a model of ministry he came to call Christian community development. In 1989, he helped found the Christian Community Development Association, a network built around the same three commitments he had preached for years: relocation into the neighborhood you’re trying to serve, reconciliation across the lines that divide it, and redistribution of whatever resources you have. Today, the association continues to train leaders and support ministries – including many in the denomination in which I serve - in under-resourced neighborhoods across the country.
That instinct - to stay, and to keep building in the same soil that had nearly killed him - runs through Christian history alongside its opposite. The same faith that shaped Perkins’s decision to forgive and rebuild also was used to justify slavery, segregation, and empire. That’s part of Christianity’s story. It isn’t this one.
Your Light Will Break Forth
In my last post, “What Love Costs the Faithful,” I reflected on what it has cost many believers to obey Jesus’s harder commands: reputation, comfort, safety, sometimes life - sometimes two-thirds of a stomach. But there is another side to the same ledger. The people who paid those costs did not spend themselves for nothing. Something was created - a clinic, a school, a movement that outlived its founder by a century, a different way of seeing a stranger. If the last post asked what obedience takes, this one asks what it leaves behind.
Scripture is just as plain about what faithfulness creates as what it costs. Isaiah describes the devotion God actually wants - loosing the chains of injustice, sharing bread with the hungry, taking in the homeless - and pairs it with a reward that arrives now, not later: “your light will break forth like the dawn... you will be like a well-watered garden” (Isaiah 58:6–11). Quoting the same prophet in his hometown synagogue, Jesus claims that mission as his own: good news to the poor, freedom for the imprisoned, sight restored to the blind, the year of the Lord’s favor announced (Luke 4:18–19). This is the ministry we’ve been invited into. Obedience is not a duty performed grudgingly for some reward awaiting us in the future - it’s how the light starts breaking in and the garden starts growing, here, now.
Building a Life Around Love
In my previous post, I named a few of the many faithful saints who have joined the “cloud of witnesses” described in Hebrews - people who bet everything on a promise they didn’t live to see fulfilled (Hebrews 12:1). Here are few more whose love, when it became action, made earth look a little more like heaven.
Dorothy Day co-founded the Catholic Worker on the conviction that feeding a hungry stranger was recognition, not charity. The person in the soup line was, in the most literal sense she could manage, Christ. She chose to live among the people she served, and the houses of hospitality she helped found are still welcoming neighbors nearly a century later.
Harriet Tubman returned to slave territory more than a dozen times, convinced God had called her, and led roughly seventy people to freedom. Later she opened her home to elderly and formerly enslaved people. For Tubman, freedom was never a status; it was an address.
Katharine Drexel, born into one of the largest fortunes in Gilded Age America, gave away much of her inheritance to found schools and missions for Black and Native American communities when few institutions would serve either. Among them was Xavier University of Louisiana, still the nation’s only historically Black Catholic university.
Millard and Linda Fuller left a successful business to found Habitat for Humanity on what Millard called “the theology of the hammer”- the conviction that the gospel could be preached as credibly with a hammer as from a pulpit. Habitat has since helped more than sixty-two million people build, repair, or improve a place to call home.
Toyohiko Kagawa, convinced that following Christ meant living among the poor rather than serving them from a distance, moved into a Kobe slum in 1909 and remained there for more than a decade. From that experience he helped launch Japan’s cooperative movement, believing economic life could be organized around mutual care instead of competition. The cooperatives he inspired remain part of Japan’s economy today.
Pandita Ramabai, whose Christian faith transformed her vision for women abandoned by society, founded a school for child widows in Bombay in 1889 and later established Mukti Mission near Pune - a refuge, school, hospital, and community for women and girls with nowhere else to go. More than 130 years later, Mukti Mission is still welcoming those the world has forgotten.
Matthew records Jesus telling his followers that whatever they did for the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner, they had done for him (Matthew 25:34-40); James defines pure religion as what we do to improve the welfare of our neighbors - caring for orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:27). Every person in this list, upon reading these verses, asked the same question: If this is true, what does it require of me? And they built their lives around the answer.
Oaks of Righteousness
Paul told an exhausted church in Galatia not to grow weary in doing good, because a harvest was coming at the proper time (Galatians 6:9). The psalmist sings that those who sow in tears will reap in songs of joy (Psalm 126:5). The same passage in Hebrews that names the cloud of witnesses goes on to describe the costliest thing love has ever done - Jesus enduring the cross - not as something borne in spite of joy, but “for the joy set before him” (Hebrews 12:1-2).
On the same night Jesus told his closest friends exactly how much loving each other was going to cost them, he told them one more thing, almost in the same breath: he wanted his own joy to be in them, so that their joy would be complete (John 15:11). Isaiah had promised something similar, generations earlier, to people doing this kind of work - that they would be called oaks of righteousness, that they would rebuild the ancient ruins and renew the ruined cities (Isaiah 61:3–4). Their love would pave the streets and shape the skylines of their communities.
The heroes of the faith that line history are not meant to be admired from a distance. They are meant to be imitated. “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses… let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us,” the writer of Hebrews concludes, and calls us to “spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Heb. 12:1-2, 10:24). Abraham and Moses. Perkins and Kagawa. Tubman and Ramabai. They have all gone before us. Now it is our turn.
Beloved: Take up whatever is in front of you, however small, however costly. The joy set before us is the same joy that met Christ on the far side of the cross, and it meets us now, every time love becomes action, every time some corner of this earth starts looking a little more like home. Love is still the most powerful, most creative force there is.