Most congregations know how to hand a struggling neighbor a bag of groceries. Far fewer know how to help that neighbor open a business, get a fair loan or own a building. Pastor and business founder Oye Waddell argues that this gap reflects a forgotten role. In his account, the church, especially the Black church, once was where a neighborhood went to get developed economically, and building wealth in poor communities belongs to the church’s real work today.
How much of that history can this conversation establish? Less than a reader might hope, and more than nothing. Waddell offers no dates, no named congregations and no records. What he offers is the testimony of a pastor who works in this field every day, a clear distinction between relief and development, and a functioning model that shows what recovering the role would require. The documentary history sits in the books he recommends, and readers who want proof should start there. The argument about the present stands on its own.
The memory Waddell is describing
Waddell leads Hustle Phoenix, which trains and funds entrepreneurs in urban neighborhoods with high crime and high unemployment, and he pastors Sojourn Village in South Phoenix. Asked why the church and economic development belong together, he answers with history before strategy.
“When I think about even the history, especially in the black church, I think before nonprofits, these 5 0 1 c threes before we had that, the church is where people went to go to get help, to get support, to get developed,” Waddell said. In his view, the church then let the government and other institutions take on the responsibility of developing its people economically. “I think that’s what we lose,” he said.
This is a claim about an institutional role, and its shape matters. Waddell describes a church that once held relief and development together and later kept only the first. For the record behind that picture, he points to Thomas Shapiro’s The Hidden Cost of Being African American and Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Color of Money, which he describes as a book about the history of banking and how banking has affected Black communities. Those are the places to test his memory against evidence.
His own starting point is specific. He grew up in inner-city Los Angeles in the 1980s and early 1990s, where many people he knew were selling drugs. He recalls that at 14 a friend’s mother, assuming he was selling too, asked to buy crack cocaine from him. The moment set him asking how he could help change his community. He speaks from that city, that era and that wound, and he declines to indict every congregation. While criticizing the split between Sunday faith and weekday work, he stops to say that many churches already press hard into this kind of discipleship.
So the claim is narrower than a charge of abandonment, and more useful. Where congregations have handed economic development entirely to outside institutions, they have given up something that once ran through the church’s own life.
Relief and development are different jobs
The distinction driving Waddell’s argument is between helping someone get through a crisis and helping someone build something that lasts. Both are good. They do different things.
He defines his terms with care. When city officials talk about economic development, he notes, “they talk about bringing big business into the city, which is great.” His own focus is closer to the ground: “We’re talking about investing in individuals and communities.” Economic development can include building homes, he grants, but his work means helping men and women in marginalized communities start businesses.
Underneath the business language is a theological question. Waddell frames development as being about people first: “How do we help people become more of God called them to be?” Relief asks what someone needs today. Development asks what someone was made to become. A congregation that only asks the first question can be generous for decades and still leave a neighborhood exactly as it found it.
Hustle Phoenix works with three kinds of capital. Intellectual capital comes through training built on what Waddell calls experiential learning, since reading about a business differs from learning one by doing. Social capital rests on his slogan that the difference between wealth and poverty is relationships. Financial capital comes through a fund that operates “almost like a bank in a sense that we don’t take deposits, but we make investments,” backed by banks and private investors and offering low-interest loans to entrepreneurs.
The skill already sitting in the pews
Social capital is where the local church enters. Waddell says Hustle Phoenix partners with churches across the city and draws on more than 250 volunteers who are business professionals in marketing, sales, operations, risk management and law. His word to pastors is blunt: “you have business people that are sometimes latent talent.” These members work all week, he explains, and are rarely asked to use that skill to serve the underserved.
Waddell describes a familiar pattern. A lawyer wants to serve God, so she is asked to help in children’s ministry. He calls children’s ministry good work. His concern is that no one shows her that her legal training can serve the kingdom too. He also names a quieter harm. When churches treat the pastorate or the mission field as the highest form of service, professionals can come to feel their own gifts count for less.
Here the memory becomes practical. If the church once developed people economically, it did so with whatever its members knew how to do. Many congregations now hold more professional skill than they have ever held, and much of it goes unused for the neighborhood. Recovering the old role may require less a new budget than a new question put to the people already present.
What Scripture asks for
Waddell roots the work in the repeated biblical charge to care for the poor and refuse to exploit them, from the law given to Israel through Jesus’ rebukes of the religious elite. That charge is plain in the text. The sharper question is what kind of care the text has in view.
The gleaning laws make a good test case. In Leviticus 19:9-10, Israelite landowners are told not to reap the edges of their fields or gather every grape, but to leave that portion for the poor and the stranger. The provision is built into the economy, and the poor do the gathering themselves. It gives them access to productive land that the owner may not close off. That does not turn Israel’s agricultural law into a blueprint for church loan funds, and faithful Christians differ on how the law of Moses applies today. The passage does show that biblical care for the poor reached past emergency handouts.
Waddell’s key text is God’s call to Abram in Genesis 12:1-3. The promise includes the words “and thou shalt be a blessing,” and it ends with the declaration that “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3). In its original setting this is a covenant promise to Abram and his descendants, the start of Israel’s calling among the nations. Waddell draws an application from it: “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 step is application rather than a direct command to a modern accountant. It runs through the question of how Israel’s calling relates to the church, which Christians answer in different faithful ways. The application still has solid footing. The pattern of being blessed in order to bless runs through the promise itself, and Waddell uses it to break down a sacred and secular divide that keeps work and mission in separate compartments.
Isn’t this the prosperity gospel with a business plan?
The worry is fair. Any talk of churches and wealth invites the suspicion that faith is being sold as a route to money.
Waddell’s model runs in the opposite direction. The prosperity gospel promises personal wealth as a reward for faith or giving. Waddell promises nothing from a verse. He offers training, mentors and loans, all of which can fail and all of which demand work from the borrower. The person meant to benefit is the neighbor, and the goal is ownership in communities that have been shut out.
Ownership is the heart of his case. Speaking of African American communities, he warned that “when we don’t own our homes and our businesses, people can push and do whatever they want to us as a people.” He says banks sometimes fail to act in Black borrowers’ best interests and that African American, Latino and Native American businesses are often left out of venture capital. Those are his assertions about the financial system, and the books he recommends are where a reader can weigh the evidence.
A second objection deserves weight. Perhaps handing development to nonprofits and government was simply wise specialization, freeing the church for what only the church can do. Waddell does not reject those partners. Hustle Phoenix works with the city, universities and other institutions. His objection is to the church withdrawing entirely, because a church that stops developing people loses a kind of presence in the neighborhood that sermons cannot replace.
That presence answers a live charge. Lisa Fields names one of the biggest objections to Christianity right now, especially in Black communities: the perception that the church takes from its community instead of adding to it. A development model answers that perception with something neighbors can see.
Why more churches don’t do it
Waddell names two obstacles. The first is time, since pastors already carry heavy loads. The second is collaboration. In his experience, churches do not partner with one another enough.
Fields locates the root of that problem in pride and the desire for credit. A leader who wants to be the only name on an effort will, she says, “end up taking credit for little to nothing instead of being part credit of something major.” Waddell makes the same point in terms of results: “the impact is diminished because we all are trying to do our little solo things.”
His remedy is realistic about human motives. Pastors, he says, are always asking what is in it for them, so Hustle Phoenix answers that question before anyone raises it, for example by bringing grant opportunities and grant-writing help to partner churches. Waddell attributes the question to fallen human nature and plans around it, building partnerships where sharing the win is easier than going it alone.
What recovering the role would look like
His first step is modest. He suggests contacting the local Small Business Administration office to learn what training programs already exist, since most cities have some organization doing work like his. Then a church can support the entrepreneurs in its own congregation and community in the simplest way available: buying from them and referring others to them, so their businesses grow, hire and give back.
His largest idea is a coalition of 50 to 100 churches pooling money to finance homes and businesses for people who have completed training but cannot get fair financing. He insists it need not drain anyone’s budget. “This doesn’t have to be a nonprofit venture. This can be a for-profit venture,” he said, describing a fund where, run well, investors make money and borrowers build ownership.
That proposal shows what the recovered role is. A charity model fixes the church in the position of the one who gives and the neighbor in the position of the one who receives, and it can keep them there indefinitely. A development model aims to change the neighbor’s position. The church still gives, but it gives toward a future in which the person it helped no longer needs the help and may one day be the lender, the employer or the mentor for someone else. That asks more of a congregation than a collection plate does. It also stands closer to the gleaning field, where the poor gathered with their own hands, and closer to the institution Waddell remembers.