Most congregations already help their neighbors. They run a food pantry, cover a light bill, hand out coats in November. This guide asks a harder question: what would it take for your church to help people in its neighborhood build something they own, so that fewer of them need the pantry next year? Oye Waddell, a pastor in South Phoenix who also leads Hustle Phoenix, an organization that trains and funds entrepreneurs in urban neighborhoods, argues that this kind of development is part of the church’s work and not a side project. The guide turns that conviction into a process your group can follow to look honestly at your own community and choose one concrete first step.
It works best with a small team of five to twelve people who have some say in how the church spends its time and money: elders, ministry leads, a few members who work in business, and at least one person who lives in the neighborhood around the building. You can move through it in one long evening, but three shorter meetings give people time to gather information between sessions. One person can also work through it alone as preparation for bringing the idea to leadership. Nobody needs to disclose their own income or finances at any point. The work is about the church and the neighborhood.
Start with what your church already does
Before reading any Scripture or hearing any argument, take an honest inventory. On a whiteboard or a large sheet of paper, list everything your congregation did for people outside its membership in the last twelve months. Include small things. A deacon who drove someone to a job interview counts. So does the back-to-school drive and the money the benevolence fund paid out.
Now draw a line down the middle of a second sheet. Label one side gets someone through today and the other changes where someone stands. Move each item to one side. Some will be easy. A bag of groceries meets a need this week. A mentor who helps someone pass a licensing exam changes what that person can earn for years. Some items will be hard to place, and the disagreement is useful. Let the group argue briefly about where they belong, then put the contested ones on the line itself.
Keep both sheets. You will come back to them at the end.
A word for whoever is leading: resist any urge to make the first column look bad. Relief is good and necessary, and people in crisis need it. The point of the exercise is to see the shape of what you do, not to shame anyone for feeding hungry people.
Reading the edges of the field
Read these passages aloud, slowly, with one person reading and everyone else following in their own Bible.
Leviticus 19:9-10 says: “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest. And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the LORD your God.”
Deuteronomy 15:8 adds a command about lending to a poor neighbor among the Israelites: “But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth.” In older English, “wanteth” means what he lacks, not what he wishes for.
Then read Genesis 12:1-3, God’s call to Abram, paying attention to verse 2: “and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.”
Work through these observation questions before anyone offers an application:
- In Leviticus, who does the gathering? What does the landowner give up, and what does the poor person receive access to?
- In Deuteronomy, what is the difference between giving someone food and lending someone what they lack? What does each assume about the person receiving it?
- In Genesis, what is the order of the promise? What comes first, and what is it for?
These texts belong to their own setting. The first two are laws given to Israel as a farming people in covenant with God, and Christians hold different views about how such laws apply to the church today. Genesis 12 is a covenant promise to Abram and his descendants. So read them first for what they meant then. Even read that way, they show that care for the poor in Israel’s law was built into how the economy worked, not only handed out after the harvest. A poor family gleaning a field was working that field with their own hands.
Waddell uses Genesis 12 as a key text with the volunteers he trains. He draws a line from Israel’s calling to be a blessing to the nations to a believer’s daily work: “God has given you your vocation, not just for you to create resource and income for yourself, but how can you be a blessing to the underserved with that very vocation.” That is an application, a step from the passage to a modern life, and your group can weigh how well it fits. Ask: if a church took the pattern of blessed-in-order-to-bless seriously, which of your two columns would it change?
What Waddell means by development
Waddell starts from Scripture’s repeated charge to care for the poor and not take advantage of them. Then he defines development in terms of people before money. “How do we help people become more of God called them to be?” he asks. That question is the real test for your second column. Relief asks what someone needs today. Development asks what someone could become, and what stands in the way.
He also narrows the term. When city leaders talk about economic development, he notes, “they talk about bringing big business into the city, which is great.” His own focus is different: “We’re talking about investing in individuals and communities.” He says development can include building homes, but his work means helping men and women in marginalized communities start businesses.
Hustle Phoenix organizes that work around three kinds of capital. Intellectual capital is training, built on learning from experience rather than only from a book. Social capital is relationships, and Waddell’s line for it is that “the difference between wealth and poverty’s relationships.” Financial capital is money, which his organization provides through a fund that makes low-interest loans to entrepreneurs.
He also makes a historical claim. In his view, before nonprofits existed, “the church is where people went to go to get help, to get support, to get developed,” especially economically, and churches have since let government and other institutions take that responsibility over. He offers this as a pastor’s reading of the past rather than a documented history. The books he recommends for the economic background, Thomas Shapiro’s The Hidden Cost of Being African American and Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money, are the place to test it. For this guide, the more useful question is the present one: which of the three kinds of capital does your congregation already hold?
Three maps of your neighborhood
This is the core of the guide. Split your team into three pairs or small groups. Each group draws one map over the next two to three weeks and brings it back to the whole team.
The first map: what neighbors say they are trying to build
This group listens. Its members talk with people who live or work within a mile of the church building: the barber, the woman who sells plates on weekends, the man who does lawn work out of his truck, the owner of the corner store, a teacher at the nearest school. Ask them what they are trying to build and what keeps getting in the way. Do not pitch a program. Write down their words as plainly as you can. If someone says the bank keeps giving them the runaround, write that down instead of a summary.
The second map: the skill sitting in your pews
Waddell’s pitch to pastors is direct: “you have business people that are sometimes latent talent.” Members go to work every week, he says, but “they’re not asked to use their talent in a way to serve the underserved.” Lisa Fields described the familiar pattern in the same conversation: a lawyer who wants to serve volunteers in children’s ministry, an executive who helps in the media booth. Both are good service. Neither uses the skill that person spends the whole week practicing.
This group asks members one question: what do you know how to do at work that a person starting a small business might need? Bookkeeping, contracts, marketing, permits, hiring, insurance, a commercial kitchen license. Members may decline to answer. Record the skill, not the job title, and only with the person’s permission.
The third map: who is already doing this
Waddell believes that nearly every city has an organization doing something like his work, some more developed than others. His first piece of advice is to contact the local Small Business Administration office and ask what training and development programs exist for small business owners. This group makes that call, and also checks with the city, local colleges and any community lenders. The goal is a short list of programs your members could join as volunteers or your neighbors could join as entrepreneurs, so the church does not try to build from scratch what already exists down the street.
Testing what you found
When the team reconvenes, lay the three maps side by side. Look for places where they touch: a need from the first map that a skill on the second map could meet, or a program on the third map that could use your volunteers. Draw lines between them.
Then test the plan against three honest objections before anyone gets attached to it.
The first is whether this is the prosperity gospel in work clothes. Ask what is being promised and to whom. Waddell’s model promises nobody wealth as a reward for faith. It offers training, mentors and loans that can fail and that ask a lot of the borrower. If your plan starts to sound like it will make the church rich or reward givers, stop and rework it.
The second is pride. Lisa Fields named it as the real barrier to churches working together: a leader who wants to be the only name on an effort will, in her words, “end up taking credit for little to nothing instead of being part credit of something major.” Waddell agreed that “the impact is diminished because we all are trying to do our little solo things.” Look at your lines. Do any of them run through another congregation or an existing program? If every line runs only through your church, ask why.
The third is motive, and Waddell is candid about it. He says pastors are always asking what’s in it for me, so his organization answers before they ask, for example by sharing grant opportunities with partner churches and offering its grant writers to help. He treats that as realism about fallen people, not cynicism. Ask what your partners would need from you to say yes.
Choosing one first step
Pick one step the church can start within a month. Here are four sizes to consider, from smallest to largest:
- Commit as a congregation to buying from and referring business owners in your church and neighborhood. Waddell calls using their services the best way to support them. His instruction is simple: “Support the business, refer them, and continue to do that.”
- Connect members from your second map to a program from your third map as volunteer mentors.
- Invite one neighboring congregation to share a single effort, with shared credit agreed in advance.
- Begin a slow conversation with several churches about pooling money for loans. Waddell dreams of 50 to 100 churches doing this for homes and businesses, and he insists that “This can be a for-profit venture” when it is run well. Treat this as a long horizon, not a next-month task.
Whatever you choose, write down three things: who owns it, what will have happened by a date three months from now, and how you will know whether it changed where anyone stands.
Questions for the whole team
- Which item on your original two-column sheet caused the most disagreement, and what did the disagreement reveal about what your church thinks help is for?
- In Leviticus 19:9-10, the poor gather the harvest themselves. Where in your church’s current work do neighbors act, and where do they only receive?
- Waddell’s application of Genesis 12 moves from Israel’s calling to a believer’s job. Where does that move seem strong to you, and where would you want to qualify it?
- What did someone on the first map say that surprised you or contradicted what the team assumed the neighborhood needed?
- Which skill on the second map has your church never thought to ask for, and what would it cost the church to start asking?
- If your step succeeds, who gets the credit? Is the team at peace with that answer?
Back to the first sheet
Return to the two columns you made at the start. Do not erase anything from the relief side. Add your chosen step to the development side, in pencil, with the date your team set.
Then look at the items still sitting on the line in the middle, the ones nobody could agree how to classify. Three months from now, when the team meets to review the first step, take one of those items and ask what it would take to move it fully across.