Bishop Vaughn McLaughlin does not hedge. Faced with critics who say the Black church does nothing for its neighborhoods, the founder and pastor of The Potter’s House International Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida, points to a mall, a school, restaurants and a payroll. Then he says, “I think that every local church is responsible for doing exactly what we do.” The fairest verdict splits his claim in two. His case that every church owes its neighbors visible, material care stands on firm biblical ground. His case that every church must own businesses is a strategy, a strong one in his setting. His own advice to small churches shows why it cannot be a universal rule.
The question usually arrives as all or nothing. Either the church is a spiritual body that should stay out of commerce, or it is a community institution that should own, employ and lend. McLaughlin’s story is more interesting than either option, and it contains its own evidence about where the limits are.
What exactly is McLaughlin claiming?
He is describing a congregation that holds deeds and signs paychecks, which goes well beyond a better stewardship sermon. By his account, The Potter’s House bought a 400,000 square foot complex for about $4 million, when building new would have cost over $45 million. It spent almost $11 million renovating it, paid for through ordinary tithes and offerings rather than a building fund drive or government money. He says the properties are now worth over $50 million and that the enterprise employs about 200 people full time. Those figures are his, and a reader should hold them as his report.
The vision behind the buildings is simple. If church members eat at restaurants, work out at gyms, get haircuts and buy clothes, McLaughlin asks why the church should not own those places. He treats each business as an extension of being the church. He is also explicit that he does not profit personally: “I have a salary from my local church, and that’s what I get paid.” Everything else, he says, goes toward empowering people and changing the neighborhood.
The claim answers a public critique: online commentary asserting that the Black church does nothing for its communities, and pushback that church-led economic empowerment belongs to an earlier era. McLaughlin’s reply is partly theological and partly evidential. The work is happening now, he says, and here it is. He also offers a principle for judging any such critique: “So when I come to the church and look at the church, you have to look at everybody individually.”
That principle sits uneasily beside his sweeping claim. If churches must be judged one by one, one Jacksonville model cannot be the measure for all of them.
Is Jacksonville typical?
Nothing in McLaughlin’s account can settle how representative The Potter’s House is, and a reader should resist treating it as a portrait of Black churches in general. It is one congregation, described by its own pastor. He himself points to variety. In cities like Brooklyn, Boston and Chicago, he says, congregations often meet in storefronts or share blocks with other businesses because land is scarce, while churches in the South often have room to build. The economic options open to a congregation depend on its city, its property, its size and its people.
The same caution applies to the critics. The claim that the Black church does nothing is also a generalization from selected examples. McLaughlin’s case does not prove that most churches are doing this work. It does disprove the blanket charge that none are, and it shows what one church did with ordinary giving.
Where does the conviction come from?
McLaughlin came to faith as an adult. He says he never set foot inside a church until he was 26, so he read the Bible without inherited assumptions about what a church could not do. What he found shaped everything: “I saw that Jesus ministry was a marketplace ministry, that he chose the disciples from the marketplace.” He adds, “There was no distinction between the marketplace and the ministry of Christ.”
The observation holds as far as it goes. Jesus called fishermen and a tax collector. His parables are full of farmers, merchants, stewards and day laborers. The gospel reached people in the middle of their economic lives.
McLaughlin builds on several texts, and they carry different weight.
His foundation is Matthew 25, where the Son of Man judges the nations by how they treated him in the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the prisoner. “Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36). Christians read the phrase “the least of these my brethren” (Matthew 25:40) in more than one way. Some understand it as Jesus’s disciples in need, others as anyone in need. On either reading, the passage refuses a faith that ignores material suffering. It supports the core of McLaughlin’s argument well.
He also points to the parable of the pounds in Luke 19, where a nobleman gives his servants money and says, “Occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13). In older English, “occupy” meant to trade or put money to work, and many modern translations render it “do business.” McLaughlin is right about the word. The parable’s main point, though, concerns faithfulness with what the master entrusts while his servants wait for his return. It commends fruitful stewardship. By itself it says nothing about congregations opening restaurants.
He draws on Isaiah 61:4-6, where those who rebuild ruined cities are called the ministers of God. That promise was first spoken to a people restored after exile, so applying it to a church renovating abandoned buildings works by analogy. It is an apt one, and McLaughlin uses it that way: the God who rebuilds broken lives can work through people who rebuild broken places. He also appeals to the creation mandate to be fruitful, multiply, replenish and subdue the earth (Genesis 1:28), a command given to humanity as a whole.
Together these texts make a strong case that productive work and care for neighbors belong inside discipleship. They make a much weaker case for any single institutional form.
Why ownership?
The most distinctive part of McLaughlin’s argument is generational. He is saying a particular community needs to own things, and that the church is one of the few institutions positioned to start.
He frames it in terms of inheritance. Some families have had businesses and money passed down. His did not. His father died, his mother worked three jobs, and nobody handed him anything. “We’re in a position where we have to start the family business,” he says, and he places his generation at a turning point: “we are like the first generation of black people in particular that have a chance now to do something for the next generation.” A church can do collectively what many individual families could not do alone. He adds that students at the church’s academy meet Black owners, not only Black employees, so that “they believe now that they too can own the business.”
Then there is hiring. McLaughlin estimates that around 25 percent of the employees at the church’s bistro were formerly incarcerated, people with felony convictions other employers would not touch. His summary of the difference between charity and employment is blunt: “So employing our people, it’s not giving ’em a fish, it’s giving ’em a job.” He also describes a business incubator with more than 27 spaces where startups paid no rent while they found their footing, expected only to give back if they prospered.
Lisa Fields adds a point that keeps this from becoming a judgment about Black churches or their members as a whole. A person in a multiethnic church, she notes, might wonder why a pastor spends so much time on money. Her answer is that critics should consider a congregation’s actual needs first, since people who received financial training at home need different teaching than people who did not. McLaughlin agrees and speaks from his own life: without a father to train him, he had to work things out alone, and he says many people in that position got it wrong.
The argument concerns access and history, and it makes no claim about what any group is capable of. It also means the strength of the ownership model depends on context. Where capital, credit and second-chance jobs are scarce, a church that owns and hires fills a real gap. Where those things are plentiful, the same model may matter less.
What happens when a church becomes a lender?
McLaughlin’s most instructive story is a partial failure, and he tells it openly. The Potter’s House started a federal credit union, which he says was the first church-owned and church-operated federal credit union in Florida. The purpose was education: teaching members to save, plan for retirement and manage money.
Then the 2008 recession hit. People stopped saving and came to borrow. McLaughlin says he sometimes gave people $500 out of his own account so they would not take on loans and interest. When borrowers could not repay, he noticed something sobering: some stopped coming to church because they owed money. The church closed the credit union, because it had never meant to become a lender of last resort.
That story shows what changes when a church moves from teaching to owning. A church that teaches stewardship stands beside its members. A church that lends to them becomes their creditor, and debt can drive a person from worship as surely as poverty can. Owning and employing carry similar risks, since a pastor who is also an employer holds more power over a member’s livelihood. None of this refutes McLaughlin. It shows that economic institutions bring new forms of responsibility, and churches that take them on need structures that protect the pastoral relationship.
The teaching itself survived. McLaughlin describes money management classes led by certified instructors and stewardship built into new member orientation. He admits he once avoided the subject because he had seen it abused from other pulpits, and changed course when he saw how many people arrived knowing nothing about giving or saving. “It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to do that,” he says. Of everything he describes, it may be the easiest piece to copy.
Isn’t this a distraction from preaching the gospel?
This is the strongest objection: the church just needs to preach the gospel. McLaughlin calls that view antiquated and grounds his reply in Luke 10, where Jesus sends out the seventy. He reads a sequence in it: bless the city, eat with the people, heal the sick, then announce the kingdom. Jesus tells them, “And heal the sick that are therein, and say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you” (Luke 10:9). In McLaughlin’s words, “The problem is people want to just preach the gospel with no remedy, no help, no assistance, no nothing.”
Luke 10 records a specific mission marked by miraculous healing. Treating it as a general pattern for church community work is an application of the passage, a step beyond its direct command. Even so, the point he draws from it is hard to dismiss: proclamation there arrives alongside care for real bodies. He sharpens it into a charge many congregations should hear: “We’re more concerned about how we say it and what we say versus what we do after the benediction.”
Acts 6 gives the objection its best scriptural footing. When a dispute arose over food for widows, the apostles said, “It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables” (Acts 6:2). Yet they kept the food ministry running and appointed others to oversee it so the preaching would not suffer. The early church organized material care while protecting the ministry of the word. That supports McLaughlin’s conviction and names a real risk in his model: a pastor so consumed by enterprise that teaching and prayer get crowded out.
He shows awareness of a related danger. Critics accused his church of turning the house of God into a place of commerce, a charge that echoes Jesus in the temple: “make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise” (John 2:16). McLaughlin’s response was physical. He says the church building was separated from the rest of the mall so worship would not sit inside the commercial space. He is equally clear about motive: “The anointing is not to make you famous and not to get you rich.” That line, with his statement that he draws only a church salary, is what separates his model from prosperity preaching. The money is meant to flow outward to the neighborhood rather than upward to the pulpit.
So is every church responsible?
McLaughlin’s practical advice reshapes his bold claim. For churches barely breaking even, he does not prescribe a mall. He describes how he and his wife started a food and clothing ministry out of the trunk of their car. He tells them to assess what the neighborhood needs, such as free home repairs or lawn care, whatever builds trust. He urges small churches to partner with ministries that already have systems in place. His summary: “you don’t need mega numbers. You just need to have mega impact.”
None of that requires owning a business. It requires knowing a neighborhood and acting on what you find. McLaughlin says as much when he warns against planting a church wherever a building happens to be available: “Because you need to have a burden for a community.” And again: “You can’t serve within the community and not serve the community.”
So the responsibility is universal and the form is prudential. Matthew 25 and the pattern of Jesus’s ministry leave every congregation accountable for hunger, prison and joblessness on its own streets. Owning, employing and lending are powerful ways to answer that, especially where a community has been shut out of capital and second chances, and the credit union shows they carry their own dangers. The question McLaughlin leaves for any congregation is practical: if it closed its doors tomorrow, which of its neighbors would lose something besides a Sunday service?
