The Rev. John M. Perkins, a Black evangelical leader who created an influential network of community-development ministries fostering social justice and racial reconciliation, and who wrote powerfully of forgiving the white officers who had once brutalized him, died on Friday at his home in Jackson, Miss. He was 95.

His daughter Priscilla Perkins confirmed the death and said he had Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

Charles Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia who had written about Mr. Perkins, called him “one of the most transformative Black Christian voices in the years after the civil rights struggle.”

Mr. Perkins’s central insight, which he first gained in the 1960s, was that faith leaders could best help impoverished communities by connecting spiritual nourishment — helping people develop a rich interior life with Jesus through the Gospel — to a more programmatic mission of fostering social and economic uplift. It was a faith-based Christian social movement that he called the “whole Gospel.”

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The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.