Black churches built credit unions, mutual aid societies, scholarship funds and senior housing. That habit did not come from nowhere. Scripture repeatedly shows God’s people refusing to profit from a neighbor’s need, organizing when someone in their midst is neglected, and seeking the good of the place where they live. Those texts do not hand anyone a blueprint for a credit union, though, and reading them as if they did would claim more than they say. This guide is for reading those passages carefully, so that the history becomes something you obey and not only something you admire.
You can work through it alone in one long sitting or with a group over two meetings. Bring a King James Bible and a pen. Each reading asks you to look at the text before you apply it. Resist the urge to skip ahead to the application.
Start with the order of events
In a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields, Dr. Marvin McMickle, president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, describes the Free African Society that Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized in Philadelphia in 1786. He explains how it worked: “like an insurance company you pay money in, and then if somebody dies, you can go there to get money for the funeral expenses.” Then he makes an observation about sequence: “Before there was the church, there was this black financial institution.”
Notice what that order does and does not tell you. It does not mean money mattered more to these believers than worship. McMickle’s account presents Allen as a preacher who went on to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The order shows that these Christians treated a neighbor’s funeral bill as part of their life together before any denominational structure existed. The question for this guide is where that instinct shows up in the Bible, and how faithfully.
First observation: Write down one assumption you already hold about why churches run community programs. Is it charity, strategy, survival or obedience? Keep the sentence. You will come back to it at the end.
Reading one: law that will not profit from a neighbor’s need
Read Exodus 22:21-27 slowly. The section sits inside a block of covenant law given to Israel, and verse 25 reads: “If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.” In King James English, a usurer is simply someone who lends at interest. The word did not yet mean only excessive interest. Look at who is protected. The command concerns a poor member of God’s own people, and the verses around it speak of the stranger, the widow and the fatherless. The law assumes lending will happen. It forbids turning a neighbor’s poverty into income.
Now turn to Nehemiah 5:1-13. This is narrative, and the crisis is described from the inside. Some of the people said: “We have mortgaged our lands, vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth” (Nehemiah 5:3). The ones profiting were their own nobles and rulers, not foreigners. Nehemiah confronts them and calls them to stop exacting interest and to return what they had taken.
Set this beside McMickle’s account of Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland, where he was later pastor. He describes Black veterans returning in 1945 who could not get mortgages from any Cleveland bank. The church organized a credit union, and members could “borrow five times the amount of their holdings in order to get either a first or second mortgage.” By the time he left, he says, it held two and a half million dollars.
Be careful here. A credit union in 1945 Ohio is not Israel obeying Exodus 22. Christians hold several faithful views about how the Mosaic law applies to the church, and this passage cannot settle that question. What carries across is narrower and still demanding. When ordinary lenders shut a door on people in need, God’s people are meant to open a door on terms that do not exploit them. Nehemiah adds a hard edge. The prophet’s anger falls on insiders who profited from their own people’s famine.
Observe: Underline every phrase in Exodus 22:21-27 that names a vulnerable person. Then list who in Nehemiah 5 was doing the harm. What does it change that the exploiters were insiders?
Reading two: a church where no one lacked
Read Acts 2:42-47 and Acts 4:32-37. Luke writes: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:44-45). Two chapters later he adds: “Neither was there any among them that lacked” (Acts 4:34).
This is narrative, so begin by asking what Luke describes and what, if anything, he commands. Read on into Acts 5:1-4. When Peter confronts Ananias, he says the land was Ananias’s own before he sold it, and the money was in his own power afterward. The sin was the lie about the gift. Keeping property was not the sin. Most Christian interpreters read the Jerusalem sharing as voluntary and Spirit-prompted generosity. They do not read it as a required economic system. Some see it as a pattern every church should imitate in some form. Others see it as a remarkable early moment that shows what the Spirit produces, without prescribing a structure. Few read it as a mandate for common ownership.
Many interpreters also hear an echo in Acts 4:34 of Deuteronomy 15:4, where God tells Israel that there should be no poor among them in the land. That link is a reasonable reading. It is not a certainty. If it holds, Luke is saying that the Spirit-filled community began to look like what the law had hoped Israel would be.
The Free African Society did something simpler and more durable than the Jerusalem believers. It did not sell everyone’s goods. Members paid in regularly so that no family would face a death alone. That is a different method aimed at the same result Luke celebrates: nobody among them lacked when the hard day came.
Observe: Find the phrase in Acts 2:45 that tells you how distribution was decided. Who determined the amount each person received?
Reading three: when a group is present but neglected
Read Acts 6:1-7. “And in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration” (Acts 6:1). One group of believers was in the room and on the rolls, yet its widows were missing out on the daily food distribution.
Look at what the apostles do. They do not dismiss the complaint as division. They have the community choose seven men to oversee the work. Many interpreters point out that all seven have Greek names, which may suggest the neglected group was given responsibility for its own care. The text does not say so outright, so hold that point loosely.
McMickle describes the conditions that drove Allen out of St. George’s Methodist Church in 1787. There, he says, “you could be present in the building if you stayed in your section, but you could not be in leadership.” Speaking about churches today, he names the question he asks of any congregation: what it is willing to do “to make itself not available, but to make itself useful” to the members it says it welcomes.
That is the same distinction Acts 6 draws. Being available is not the same as being useful. The two stories end differently, and the difference matters. In Jerusalem, the leaders fixed the neglect from within. In Philadelphia, according to McMickle’s account, the neglect was not fixed, and Allen built something new. Acts 6 does not tell us when leaving is right. It shows what faithful leaders do when a complaint of neglect is true.
Observe: What did the apostles give up in Acts 6:2-4, and what did they keep? What did the Grecian believers gain besides food?
Reading four: building in a place that did not want you
Read Jeremiah 29:1-7. It is a letter to exiles in Babylon who wanted to hear that their stay would be short. Instead the prophet tells them to build houses, plant gardens and raise families. Then comes this: “And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace” (Jeremiah 29:7).
This was addressed to Judah’s exiles in the sixth century before Christ, not to anyone else, so any use of it today is application by analogy. The analogy is still instructive. God tells a displaced people to invest where they are, without waiting for permission or for conditions to improve. McMickle cites Charles Hamilton’s description of the Black church’s advantages, one of which is that “it doesn’t need permission from downtown to do whatever it wants to do.” He also says segregation, whatever its harms, “forced us into an entrepreneurial spirit.” He is careful to list the costs alongside that point. Jeremiah’s letter offers no comfort about exile. It gives a command to build in the middle of it.
Where the reading stops
None of these passages proves that Black churches were right in every program, and none of them proves that the instinct to build is uniquely Black. What they show is a pattern of obedience. That cuts in two directions. Nehemiah 5 reminds you that the sharpest rebuke went to insiders who profited from their own people. McMickle does not claim every congregation lived up to its heritage. He says, more modestly, “There’s a good core left that really is still doing the work.” The same Scriptures that explain the credit union also judge any church that takes and does not give.
That is why this inheritance reads as discipleship and not only as achievement. Achievement can be admired from a distance. Obedience has to be continued. Jude 3 Project honors the Black church as a guardian of historic Christian faith and a witness for justice, and calls it, like every tradition, to continual faithfulness to Scripture. Galatians 6:10 puts the standing instruction plainly: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.”
A practice: trace one ministry back to its text
- Choose one real work of community care you can learn about firsthand. It might be a food pantry, a scholarship fund, a housing ministry, a burial fund or a tutoring program at a church you know. If you know none, use one of the examples from McMickle’s account.
- Find out what need it was started to meet, and when. Ask someone who was there or read the church’s own records. Write down only what you can confirm.
- Pick the passage from this guide that it most resembles. Write one sentence on what truly matches and one sentence on what does not.
- Decide whether the passage you chose is a command, a description or an analogy. Write down how that changes what you can claim from it.
- Name one need within your reach this month that resembles the need the ministry answered. Write down one concrete thing you will do about it, with a date.
In a group, have people do steps one through four before the meeting and bring their two sentences. Spend most of your time on step three. Disagreement about what does not match is useful, because it keeps the group from turning every program into a fulfilled verse. If someone’s church history includes harm alongside the good, let them say so without pressing for detail.
Questions to work through together
- Exodus 22:25 protects the poor from a lender’s profit. What does it mean, today, to lend or give on terms that do not exploit someone’s need?
- Nehemiah’s rebuke landed on insiders. Where might a church profit from its own members’ needs without noticing?
- If the sharing in Acts 2 and 4 was voluntary, what made it so widespread? What does the passage itself credit?
- Acts 6 and Allen’s departure from St. George’s end differently. What would you need to know about a situation to judge which response fits it?
- Jeremiah told exiles to seek the peace of a city that had not welcomed them. Where is it harder for you to invest: in a place that excludes you or in a place that ignores you?
- Which of these passages most challenges the way you currently give money or time, and why that one?
Go back to the sentence you wrote at the start about why churches run community programs. Read it again after these texts. If you would write it differently now, name the passage that changed it.