Ministers Of Finance

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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.