The church’s justice work, beyond marching and hashtags, looks like ownership, lending, housing and work: the slow institutions that decide whether a neighborhood can stay a neighborhood. Andrew Wilkes, an ordained minister from Atlanta whose work sits where congregational ministry, community development and economic justice meet, places that work inside what he calls “a distinctive black social gospel tradition.” In that tradition the church names economic injustice plainly, then helps build things like community land trusts and credit unions that last longer than any protest.
Marches still matter. Wilkes treats nonviolent direct action as a real and needed form of witness. His point is that a march is one instrument. The rest of the work belongs to people who will never hold a bullhorn.
Where does this way of thinking come from?
The claim needs to be stated precisely. Wilkes does not say the Black church, as a single body, thinks one way about money, or that every Black Christian holds a social gospel. He names a specific strand of Christian thought and says it differs from the white social gospel tradition people usually mean by that phrase. He wrote his book, Freedom Notes, to bring that strand into a conversation about faith, justice and democracy.
He speaks as the son of Black physicians who grew up in comfortable circumstances, and he rejects a talented tenth reading of his own vocation. For him freedom is an equalizing call to discipleship. So this is a middle-class minister arguing with his own class about what it owes, without claiming to speak for everyone.
He grounds the urgency in Jesus’ first public words. Mark 1:15 records them: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.”
His view of human responsibility rests on a specific idea of how God works. God, he argues, “dignifies humanity by assigning a portion of agency,” inviting people into “co-laboring with God within history to move towards freedom.” He is careful about the order. People are not the senior partner. God keeps the direction of history in his own hands. Human work is real but derivative, which keeps justice work from becoming either passive waiting or self-salvation.
What is the difference between speaking out and building?
This is the most useful distinction Wilkes offers, and the one most congregations miss. He describes two dimensions of freedom work. The prophetic dimension is the familiar one: the church speaks truth to power and says that too many people are homeless or cannot afford an apartment or a first home. He calls that an important part of the work.
Then he names a second dimension. “And by royal I mean attending to the administrative dimensions of freedom and justice.” Prophets denounce. Kings administer. A church that only does the first can describe a housing crisis eloquently every Sunday and leave every family exactly where it was. His examples of the royal side are concrete:
these are structural policy responses that are pushing long-term housing affordability, that suggests that private property does not have to always and everywhere be the kind of default option
A community land trust, as Wilkes presents it, is a housing tool that resists residential displacement and keeps land serving residents. Credit unions and public banks, he says, open opportunities for small businesses, homeowners and nonprofits. These are institutions with boards, balance sheets and decades of life. They will not trend, and they will still be open after the news crew leaves.
He frames the stakes with a sharp image. He says “there’s a huge prayer disparity in the church,” that the prayers Black and Latino worshipers bring to the altar are categorically different from the prayers prayed in white churches, and that “this prayer disparity is preventable.” The logic is worth following. If one congregation prays every week about eviction, foreclosure and unpayable debt, and another rarely does, some of that difference comes from arrangements people made and can change. Wilkes argues that closing the gap requires “a structural concern for freedom,” one that acts on policy before a party platform tells it what to think.
Why does Wilkes insist no economic system is sacred?
Here his argument becomes pointed, and it needs careful handling. Wilkes calls capitalism “a human created institution” and says it is not inherently sacred. He immediately adds that no sociopolitical system is. That second clause is easy to skip, and it keeps the argument from becoming a partisan pitch. Every system, including any he might prefer, loses the right to be treated as untouchable.
His reason is theological: the world is God’s creation before it is anyone’s market. Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” In Israel’s law, the jubilee instructions rest on the same conviction. Leviticus 25:23 reads, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.”
Restraint is needed here. Leviticus 25 is covenant law given to Israel for land in Canaan, and faithful Christians differ on how such laws apply to the church and to modern nations. The passage does not command community land trusts. It does establish a principle a Christian can reason from: in Scripture, ownership is real but not ultimate, and God cared enough about families losing land permanently to write a reset into Israel’s economic life. Wilkes reaches for the same tradition when he jokes that indebted graduates should run through the streets of student lenders crying Jubilee.
From that premise he draws a political conclusion: the church can back policies that are independent of both major parties and that serve its congregants and the people it invites to discipleship. Allegiance to Christ comes before allegiance to any party, so the church is free to judge each proposal on what it does to people.
Whose economy is being described?
Which people, and which period, are in view? Wilkes is specific. He says his book covers roughly eight to ten years, set in the Obama years and the slow recovery from the Great Recession. He argues that many Black communities have not fully recovered because so many homes were foreclosed, and he says most Black wealth is held in homes. Those are his assertions, and readers should weigh them as his reading of the period. The logic is clear enough: if a family’s savings live in its house, a foreclosure wave erases the cushion it would have used in sickness or old age.
He also warns against reading one headline number as the whole story. Asked about national claims that Black unemployment had reached a record low, Wilkes separated the aggregate from particular groups and places. He singled out young people between 16 and 24 and named neighborhoods in several cities, including parts of Atlanta. “You can’t talk about the weather in general,” he said, and expect the citywide forecast to describe one block or one home.
A good national statistic does not prove that nothing needs fixing, and no single condition describes every Black neighborhood. Land trusts and credit unions are local tools because the needs are local.
His alternative to purely individual advancement is a frame he calls commonwealth: wealth held and stewarded in common, alongside individual wealth creation. A credit union is owned by its members. A land trust holds land for a community over time. Anyone can still build a business or buy a home. Some goods, like an affordable block, can only be protected together.
Where do ordinary believers fit?
Plenty of believers know marching is not their calling, and they will never write an op-ed or build a following online. Wilkes answers by widening the map of who counts as a justice worker.
He names people deciding how to incorporate a business so it measures success by social and ecological outcomes and not profit alone. He names public interest attorneys, accountants and people with culinary gifts. Of the accountants he says, “The books gotta get balanced.” Then he states the principle underneath:
And it’s really about a doctrine of vocation and gifts that is much more expansive than just over valorizing what a preacher does in the streets or over valorizing what a politician or a judge does.
This connects the institutional argument to the priesthood of believers. A land trust needs lawyers who understand property law and accountants who can keep it solvent. A credit union needs loan officers who know the neighborhood. A church that only celebrates the preacher at the rally will never build either, because it has taught its accountants that their skills are secular. Wilkes’s image for the whole effort is a choir or an orchestra, gifts joined together that “can create a symphony of freedom.” No single instrument carries the piece.
Prayer stays in the same week. Wilkes lists personal piety beside “there’s liturgy for Sunday, there’s organizing on Monday and Wednesday,” and he treats the Lord’s Prayer as a resource for lament after natural and community disasters. He also argues against cookie cutter solutions, with a biblical reason: “Paul’s letters are occasional.” Paul wrote to particular churches about particular problems. The gospel stayed the same from city to city while its address to each church changed. A credit union may suit one neighborhood and a land trust another.
What does this ask of the Black middle class?
Here Wilkes turns the analysis on himself and people like him, and this is where his argument is most distinctive. He describes an older model in middle-class Black spaces: the race man or race woman who superintends, mentors “the underprivileged,” and draws others into respectability. He argues that this can quietly become acculturation into racial capitalism and white supremacy, stripping away people’s own identity. He ties it to Christ too, warning that the same habit produces a disembodied picture of Jesus that forgets he was a first-century Palestinian Jew.
His alternative is a change of position. “I don’t want to speak on someone’s behalf.” He wants to stand alongside people already raising their own voices. He urges middle-class believers to “always be engaged in that difficult work of self-examination and repentance,” and to honor labor in every form, including home health work, janitorial work and construction.
He names a specific temptation: “it’s easy for black middle class folks to blame black working class folks” rather than locate the blame in the system where he believes it lies. Black communities are not economically uniform, and Wilkes refuses to pretend class tension is absent. His call is for people with more resources to examine themselves first. Repentance starts at home.
Isn’t this just politics wearing a robe?
That is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. Christians have often confused a policy agenda with the gospel, and a church that endorses every economic proposal its leaders favor will drive away members who love Jesus and vote differently. Faithful Christians do disagree about public banking, tuition policy and property law, and a pulpit should not pretend otherwise.
Wilkes’s own argument contains part of the answer. Because no system is sacred, no party’s program is either, including any he might prefer. His examples illustrate the royal dimension; he does not offer them as a creed. A reader can accept his distinction between prophetic speech and patient institution-building while disagreeing with a particular proposal. The distinction is the lasting contribution. The policy list is his application of it.
The other part of the answer concerns Scripture. Wilkes says “we are always making a deliberate choice when we’re reading scripture,” and he wants believers to choose readings that free people. The safeguard is that a liberating reading still has to answer to what the passage meant in its own setting. The jubilee text earns its place in this argument because the economic concern is really in it. Read that way, careful interpretation is part of what Wilkes calls “loving the Lord with all our mind.”
He adds one more condition: “hope is a precondition of moving towards freedom.” That condition explains why the royal work is so rare. Nobody signs on to a forty-year land trust while believing the neighborhood is already lost. A church that wants to build has to keep teaching its people, from Scripture, that the land belongs to God and the future is still open.