The complaint usually comes in one breath: the church on the corner has a full parking lot every Sunday, a pastor in a good car, and a neighborhood around it with no grocery store, no bank and no jobs. The people who say it are not always hostile to faith. Many grew up in those pews. What they are describing is a church that seems to take money out of a community and send little back.
Five Black pastors and scholars, in conversations with Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields, treat that complaint as half right. They reject it as a description of the Black church as a whole, and several of them can point to work that contradicts it. But they accept the failure underneath it. Too many congregations speak about money mainly as something to collect. Far fewer speak about it as a rival master competing with God for the heart, or as a resource that should stay and work in the neighborhood a church claims to serve.
- Dr. Malcolm Foley names greed as a bondage the pulpit avoids.
- Oye Waddell trains and funds entrepreneurs through local churches.
- Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin leads a congregation that buys buildings, runs businesses and hires people other employers turn away.
- Dr. Heber Brown turns idle church land into food.
- BJ Thompson asks givers whether their money leaves people stronger.