Ministers Of Finance

By Julie Rawe

On a gritty block in St. Louis, Mo., the Williams Temple Church of God opens for business each Wednesday with morning Bible study and closes with an evening seminar on debt management. "Satan likes to isolate you," intones the Rev. Maurice Bembry, who teaches the personal-finance class. "He likes to make you feel like you're the only one in debt."

Seated with Bembry are a couple of dozen congregants, most of whom are middle-aged, middle-income African-American women with big credit-card bills and little or no savings. One by one they rise and recite their goals: to buy a home, start a business, finance a child's education. Dwana Washington, 42, says she would like to do all these things and also build up her $1,000 nest egg--a daunting ambition, considering how much she spends each month on day care for her three kids. Another woman volunteers that she is saving $11 a month by getting rid of call waiting and three-way calling. Bembry approves: "You've got to reprogram your thinking--separate your needs from your wants."

Bembry, 44, is part of a new wave of ministers who are teaching their flocks how to climb out of debt and into the financial markets. His is one of 120 churches that have paid $1,000 each to join One Thousand Churches Connected, an economic-literacy program led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "This is not about poor; it's about poor habits," says Jackson. "People are buying fancy cars and renting houses. They are choking on debt, living beyond their means."

Jackson knows well the pitfalls he's preaching about, having had his own questionable finances examined by the Illinois attorney general and, in recent years, probed almost weekly by TV pundit Bill O'Reilly. But even his critics concede that the civil rights leader has always had a keen eye for high-profile crusades. And there's a great need today for money-management skills, especially among African Americans, who are a third less likely than whites to be homeowners or stockholders and who often are targets of predatory lenders.

In a recent poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 45% of respondents said they would be more likely to try financial services if they were sponsored by their church. And companies are eager to peddle their wares to such receptive audiences. Some firms, including Citigroup, Intuit and Freddie Mac, have signed on to work with One Thousand Churches. But others like Merrill Lynch--which quietly donated $30,000 to the program last month--seem hesitant to publicly affiliate themselves with Jackson's financial ministry.

Some ministers are equally cautious, remembering too well characters like the Reverend Ike, a notorious 1970s televangelist who espoused his unique brand of prosperity theology from a mink-lined Rolls-Royce. But Jackson's pitch is nothing like Ike's. "These are not get-rich-quick schemes," Jackson says. "This is about learning to own your own home and to plan for your child's college education." Jackson readily admits, though, that he's targeting a potentially lucrative group: "A thousand churches is a substantial niche market."

By banding together, congregations are trying to leverage the same consumer power they wielded in fighting for jobs and rights in the 1960s--but this time to gain better access to financial services and end what Jackson refers to, with typical flourish, as "economic apartheid." No boycotts are being threatened this time around. Instead, Jackson is uniting an underserved market with customer-hungry companies. New York Stock Exchange (N.Y.S.E.) chairman Dick Grasso agrees: "It's an absolutely perfect alignment."

Citigroup is offering graduates of the One Thousand Churches program six months of free checking and is considering a credit-card deal. Insurance companies, computer makers and Internet service providers are also coming to the table with special offers. Freddie Mac donated $1 million and developed One Thousand Churches' tutorials on credit scoring and home ownership. "The future of the housing market rests with minorities and first-time home buyers," says Willie Spears, an executive at New Orleans' Hibernia National Bank, "so in that respect we're being a little selfish."

Jackson's economic-literacy program dovetails with corporate growth strategies in part by trumpeting the economic value of faith. "Church members tend to be more stable people," he says. "They tend to subject themselves more to instruction. They're joiners." It's unlikely Jackson or his group will make any money from this venture, other than through donations from participating companies. Still, many ministers are so fearful of compromising their integrity that the program prohibits pitching any particular financial services during its seminars.

As Bembry guides his students through the mysteries of credit scoring, he peppers the seminar with practical advice not found in the workbooks: Keep all receipts so you can see where your money is going. Create an emergency fund. Avoid ATMs with usage fees. (Bembry knows how seductive these machines can be; he installed one in each of the two gas stations he owns.)

Once churches pay to join One Thousand Churches, classes are free for individuals. But Bembry zeroes in on one goal of the program: "After you've got yourself in a position to do so, pay God first. Tithe 10%. Then pay yourself."

Having majored in finance, Bembry has more formal investment training than most One Thousand Churches ministers, who often tap church members with experience in the financial sector to run the classes. While most seminaries offer at least one business-oriented course on church management, fewer than 10% teach personal finance. "It's the great silent subject, a huge gap in pastoral training," says Dick Towner, who founded the Good $ense Ministry, in South Barrington, Ill., in 1987.

To help fill this education gap, One Thousand Churches gives preachers a list of biblical passages on financial planning. The program's fee also covers a three-day crash course for pastors at the N.Y.S.E. In April, in a gilded conference room at the 250-year-old exchange, dozens of black ministers were immersed in Wall Street vocabulary--syndicate, suitability, zero-coupon bond--before taking a tour around the trading floor.

When Jackson first conceived of One Thousand Churches five years ago, the stock market was soaring and many blacks were missing out. Rainbow/PUSH asked the National Association of Investors Corp., a nonprofit educational group, to develop a yearlong course to teach churchgoers how to read a financial report and evaluate risk and reward. So far, 25 member churches have formed investment clubs.

"Everyone came in thinking 'We're gonna make money hand over fist,'" says McKinley Brown, president of the Genesis investment club that started two years ago in February at Chicago's Vernon Park Church of God. But nearly half of the group's 16 members had never invested before, and their monthly club dues languished in a bank for almost a year before they got up the nerve to buy a few shares of Walgreens, based on the principle of buying what you know. "We were very, very timid," Brown says. (His club's Walgreens stock has since risen 10%.)

"You have to deal with financial issues from the pulpit," says the Rev. Barbara King (no relation to Martin Luther), the founder of Atlanta's Hillside Chapel & Truth Center, a church that recently joined Jackson's program. But King doesn't mean that ministers should be doling out stock picks with their sermons. She likens preaching about investments to preaching about elections: "I don't tell people who to vote for. I tell people they should vote, and I talk about the value of voting."

One Thousand Churches has targeted some big congregations with high-profile preachers like the Rev. Marvin Winans, the Grammy-winning gospel singer who heads Detroit's Perfecting Church. Winans joined One Thousand Churches after a personal entreaty from Jesse Jackson. "If he can't put fire under you, nobody can," Wynans says. "That doesn't mean I always agree with all of his talk and schemes. But this time I did. This time it made sense."

But Jackson has only so many buddies he can call on, and personal rivalries may hamstring his recruitment drive. Two years after the program was launched, One Thousand Churches is almost 900 members short of its goal. Enrollment has grown slowly, not because ministers don't recognize the need it seeks to fill, but in part because Jackson's involvement tends to raise doubts. Some say he forfeited his moral leadership with last year's revelations that he fathered a child in an extramarital affair and neglected to report how much one of his nonprofits had paid the mother. Amended tax returns were submitted. Jackson also has been recently tarred in a controversial book, Shakedown, by conservative polemicist Kenneth Timmerman, which alleges that the civil rights leader finances himself and his causes by threatening corporations that don't donate money. Since Jackson founded the group in 1971, Rainbow/PUSH has plugged several programs that quickly fizzled, leaving one businessman to denounce his initiatives as "p.r. shows." Jackson denies all charges of corruption, though he admits to some mistakes in judgment. And like any good Baptist, he always holds out hope of redemption. "Those who are behind the most must take the most initiative to catch up," Jackson tells new recruits to his financial ministry. He could as easily be talking about himself.

--With reporting by Collette McKenna Parker/Atlanta, Joseph Szczesny/Detroit and David Thigpen/St. Louis

With reporting by Collette McKenna Parker/Atlanta, Joseph Szczesny/Detroit and David Thigpen/St. Louis