When Black Americans were shut out of banks, public schools, decent housing and even dignified burial, the church was the one institution they owned outright. So it became the place where a community pooled its money, its land and its trained people into things that lasted: schools, senior homes, funeral homes and credit unions. Dr. Charlie Dates makes that case plainly, and this guide takes it one step further. If the church once carried a people’s economic life, what does stewardship and shared wealth ask of a congregation now?
You can work through this alone in one sitting or with a group over one or two meetings. The guide moves from your own assumptions, to what Dates actually claims, to several Scripture passages read with care, to one honest objection, and then to a practice your church can carry out. The discussion questions near the end work best after the practice, not before it.
Begin with your own picture of a church
Before reading further, finish this sentence in a few honest words: A church exists to…
Most people’s answers cluster around worship, preaching, prayer, fellowship and maybe outreach. Few people write build a school or run a credit union. That gap is worth noticing. It doesn’t mean your answer is wrong. It means many of us have inherited a picture of church that is mostly about Sunday, and the history Dates describes doesn’t fit inside that picture very easily.
If you are leading a group, have everyone write their sentence privately first, then read a few aloud without comment. Keep the sentences. You will come back to them at the end.
What Dates means by “wealth”
The claim at the center of this lesson is blunt. Dates says, “It’s no secret that the black church has been the wealthiest institution in black America.”
That sentence can be heard wrongly in two directions. Some will hear a boast about money. Others will hear a suspicion about money, the worry that churches have too much of it. Dates heads off both. He says the wealth he means isn’t merely offerings, and then names what it is: “the intellectual resources, the wisdom of education of doctors and lawyers and teachers and preachers.”
That is the first distinction this guide wants you to keep. Wealth, in Dates’s account, starts with people. A congregation that seats a nurse, a contractor, an accountant, a retired teacher and a lawyer holds knowledge that a whole neighborhood may lack access to. The buildings came later. Dates says that wisdom “materialized itself into building buildings.” The money followed the people, not the other way around.
This matters for the application. A small church may hear “economic engine” and assume the conversation is only for congregations with large budgets. Dates’s own definition suggests otherwise.
What a shut-out people built
Dates walks through four kinds of institutions, most of them from Chicago, where he was speaking. Read them as examples he offers rather than as a complete history.
Schools. Dates says the first schools for Black children in Chicago came from Black churches, and he names Mount Calvary Baptist Church as the first Black church there to build a school for Black children from the ground up. He points to others, including a Christian school at a church in Miami, and says there are many examples of “how black churches built black institutions.”
Homes for elders. In what he calls the black belt of Chicago, Dates says senior living facilities built by churches still stand. He names the South Park homes connected to South Park Baptist Church, Liberty Village connected to Liberty Baptist Church, and the T.E. Brown Apartments connected to Progressive Baptist Church. His explanation is simple: “when black people had nowhere else to go, they turned to the church.”
Funeral homes. This is the example many readers find most striking. Dates says, “Black people were discriminated against, not only in life, but also in death.” He says that half of Chicago’s major Black funeral homes came out of Progressive Baptist Church alone. And he draws out two results. Those businesses made entrepreneurs wealthy, and, in his words, “they established dignity for black people.” A family that could not get a respectful burial elsewhere could get one from people connected to its own church.
Credit unions. Dates mentions the federal credit union at Concord Baptist Church, associated with Gardner Taylor, and a credit union at Canaan Baptist Church in Urbana-Champaign. He also names J. Alfred Smith in Oakland among many who worked to “shift the economic hope and future of black America.”
Notice what ties these four together. Each one answers a specific exclusion. No school would take the children, so the church built one. No home would take the elders, so the church built one. No bank would lend, so the church organized its own. The institutions weren’t side projects attached to worship. They were what worship looked like when a congregation took its neighbors’ needs seriously. Dates also notes that many of these places “were born out of and yet maintained relevant connections to the black church.” The connection didn’t end at the ribbon cutting.
Reading the Scripture behind it, carefully
It is tempting to grab a few verses and declare that the Bible commands churches to run businesses. The texts are more interesting than that, and more demanding. Read each passage slowly, and pay attention to what kind of writing it is.
Acts 4:32-35
Acts 4:32 says, “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” Verse 34 adds, “Neither was there any among them that lacked.”
Acts is narrative. It describes what the Jerusalem believers did; it does not issue a rule that every church must pool all property. Even within Acts, the sharing appears voluntary. So the passage doesn’t hand us a model to copy line by line. What it does show is the result the early church cared about: nobody among them lacked. The measure of their generosity was not a giving total. It was whether anyone went without.
Observation prompt: In verses 34-35, who brings the resources, who receives them, and what decides how much each person gets?
Deuteronomy 15:7-8
This is law given to Israel about the poor among them. Verse 8 says, “But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth.” The word “wanteth” here is older English for lacking, not desiring.
Christians hold different views on how the laws given to Israel apply to the church today, and this guide doesn’t settle that. But you don’t need to settle it to see the heart of the passage. God tells his people not to shut their hand against a needy neighbor, and the specific form that open hand takes is a loan. That is close to what a church credit union does when a member can’t get credit anywhere else.
Nehemiah 2:17-18
Nehemiah finds Jerusalem’s walls broken down and calls the people to rebuild. In verse 18 they answer, “Let us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good work.” Again this is narrative, about a particular moment in Israel’s history. It isn’t a promise that every building project is blessed. It does show a community seeing a shared ruin and deciding to repair it together rather than each family fending for itself.
Proverbs 13:22
“A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.” Proverbs offers wise principles, not guarantees. This verse doesn’t promise that faithful people will become rich. It describes what wisdom tends to aim at: something that outlasts you and reaches grandchildren. A school, a senior home or a credit union is that kind of inheritance, held by a community instead of a single family.
The honest objection
Some readers will push back here, and the pushback deserves a real answer. Isn’t the church’s job the gospel? Doesn’t all this talk of wealth sound uncomfortably close to preachers who promise prosperity in exchange for faith?
Both concerns are fair. The answer turns on a distinction. Prosperity teaching tells individuals that faith will make them wealthy. What Dates describes runs the opposite direction. People who were excluded pooled what they had so that others could learn, age, borrow and be buried with dignity. Nobody in his account is promised riches for believing. The wealth flows outward to meet need. Galatians 6:10 puts the priority plainly: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.”
There is also a second objection worth sitting with. Dates’s examples come from a time when Black families had, as he says, nowhere else to go. Many of those doors are now legally open. Does the model still apply? Possibly not in the same form. Some needs have changed, and some institutions may no longer be the right answer. But exclusion hasn’t disappeared, and the underlying question remains the same: who near your church is still shut out, and from what? That question can’t be answered from a history lesson. It has to be answered by looking.
Dates closes the lesson with a line of faith rather than a business plan: “We’ve come this far by faith leaning on the Lord, and we’re gonna keep going by faith leaning on the Lord.” That ordering matters. In his account, the schools and credit unions didn’t replace dependence on God. They were what dependence on God produced.
A practice: take inventory of what your church already holds
This exercise applies Dates’s definition of wealth to your own congregation. It works best with a few people from the same church, but one person can begin it alone. Plan for two weeks.
- List the people, not the budget. Write down the kinds of training and work represented in your congregation: trades, professions, business owners, retirees with decades of skill. Don’t write names without permission; categories are enough. Dates counted doctors, lawyers, teachers and preachers. Count what your church actually has.
- List what you physically hold. Rooms, kitchens, parking, vans, land, hours when the building sits empty.
- Find one exclusion. Ask at least two people who live near your church, or a local school, clinic or community group, where people nearby get turned away. Listen more than you suggest. Write down their words, not your guess.
- Match one asset to one need. Choose a single, small connection between your lists and what you heard. It might be a tutoring hour, a budgeting class taught by an accountant in the pews, or simply connecting a family to a lender who will treat them fairly.
- Ask what would make it last. Dates’s examples outlived the people who started them. Write down what it would take for your one idea to still exist in ten years.
For group leaders: steps one and two can happen in a single meeting. Step three needs time outside the room, so give people the week. Some members may feel awkward naming their own skills; let them contribute categories without attaching themselves to them. And resist turning step four into a large program on the first try. The goal is to practice seeing the church the way Dates describes it.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at the sentence you wrote at the start. Did anything in Dates’s account change it, add to it, or make you defend it more firmly?
- Dates defines the church’s wealth first as its people and their knowledge. What becomes possible for a small congregation if that definition is right?
- Acts 4 measures generosity by whether anyone lacked. What would it look like to measure your church that way, and what would you need to know to do it honestly?
- Dates says the funeral homes created wealth for entrepreneurs and dignity for families. Can those two goals pull against each other in a church-connected business? How would you guard against that?
- Where do you see people near your church shut out today? How confident are you in that answer, and how did you learn it?
- What is the difference between a church that runs programs and a church that builds institutions? Is one more faithful than the other?
Something to carry
Dates’s history shows a church that looked at closed doors and treated them as a call to build. The question it leaves is not whether your congregation can match Chicago’s schools and funeral homes. It is smaller and harder. Once you have finished the inventory, read your list of people and your list of needs side by side. Which name on the first list could answer a line on the second, and has anyone asked them?