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."