Full Faith and Credit

While Wall Street and Main Street fret about a looming credit crunch, Werner Marroquin will tell you it’s old news on his side of town.

The community organizer for Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Koreatown is exploring ways to help low-income Latino immigrants become business owners. If the banks and the government won’t do it, he figures God must become the lender of last resort.

“The church can’t ignore the poverty that surrounds it,” he said. “The needs of our community go beyond the spiritual.”

During the last two days, Marroquin and representatives of 140 area churches huddled at USC to discuss how they can spark their communities’ economic salvation. They are part of a fast-growing movement of church folk nationwide who are pushing faith-based economic development beyond the food pantries and thrift stores that are the hallmarks of the urban church.

From entrepreneurial training in South-Central Los Angeles to shopping-center development in the heart of Detroit, religious leaders are taking up the secular tools of business and finance to address the earthly as well as spiritual needs of their flocks.

“If the church doesn’t do it, it won’t happen,” said Lula Bailey Ballton, executive director of the West Angeles Community Development Corp. “No one else has a reason to do it.”

“Business Development,” “Financial Management,” “Contract Negotiations.”

The workshop titles at the USC conference reflected the intersection of capitalism and Christianity that’s guiding outreach projects in many urban churches today.

In Los Angeles, such efforts are most visible in large African American congregations such as the First African Methodist Episcopal (FAME) church in South-Central.

Through nonprofits such as its FAME Renaissance economic development corporation, the church has launched programs that provide entrepreneurial training, start-up capital and technical assistance for would-be business owners.

Such efforts haven’t gone unnoticed in the business community. When the Small Business Administration wanted to resume its micro-lending program in Los Angeles early this year, it looked to FAME Renaissance to administer the funds in South-Central and neighboring communities.

The church also has ventured beyond the nonprofit realm with FAME Personnel Services, a for-profit, temporary employment agency that finds jobs for community residents.

This isn’t your grandmother’s church-basement rummage sale. The needs of the community have changed with the times, and the church must change with them, says Mark Whitlock, executive director of FAME Renaissance.

“People need faith but they also need jobs, housing and money to start businesses,” Whitlock said. “The church has a role to play in strengthening the economic fiber of our communities.”

Religious institutions have a long history in economic development, particularly in the African American community, whose churches spawned black-owned banks, schools and insurance agencies during Reconstruction.

But development experts point to the movement’s renewed energy and increasing sophistication over the last decade. They credit a variety of factors for the progress, from welfare reform, conservative politics and the failure of big government to revitalize cities, to a new breed of church leaders who cut their teeth in the business world and are bringing those skills to the pulpit.

The Rev. James R. Samuel, pastor of Little Rock African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Charlotte, N.C., is among the young professionals leading the charge. A former banker, the 45-year-old Samuel became a preacher in the post-civil rights era, at a time when the fight for equality had moved beyond voting rights and desegregation of public facilities.

“It seemed to me that the most important struggle at the time was economic development,” Samuel said in a telephone interview. “That meant the church had an obligation to engage itself in the empowerment and attainment of self-sufficiency in the black community.”

For Little Rock AME, that means nurturing potential business owners in its own pews. Launched in 1996, EARN Ministry (for Economic Assistance Resource Network) provides training and development for would-be entrepreneurs, resulting in about 40 new or expanded businesses to date. The church even allots time before Sunday worship to allow business owners to pitch their services from the pulpit.

Big-city churches like Detroit’s Hartford Memorial Baptist Church have developed for-profit real estate projects to bring badly needed retail outlets, restaurants and services into neglected urban centers--along with profits to subsidize the church’s myriad social programs.

“You can only pass the hat so many times,” said the Rev. Charles Adams, whose church owns a 14 1/2-acre shopping center anchored by a Super Kmart. “We need other sources of money [besides tithes] to continue doing this massive work.”

But combining the charity-oriented mission of a church with the bottom-line demands of a business isn’t easy, and even the most experienced practitioners have stumbled. Chicago-based Bethel New Life, a highly regarded Lutheran community development organization, counts a money-losing credit union and an ill-fated recycling center among its housing and employment ventures.

“We’ve learned the hard way on some projects,” said Bethel New Life President Mary Nelson. “It takes guts to make these risky decisions and put our lives and assets on the line. But it has got to be done.”

Experts say the key to creating critical mass in the sprawling Los Angeles area is to mobilize the area’s thousands of small churches. Partnership, cooperation and collaboration were key themes at the USC conference--a message not lost on Immanuel Presbyterian’s Marroquin.

“There are enough resources in this city to build a kingdom,” he said. “It’s a matter of pulling them together.”