God's long-shot in the inner city: a vision of church-based economic development

Christian Century, July 5, 1995 by S. Mark Heim

ON AN EARLY SPRING evening almost a hundred people gather in the Dorchester Temple Baptist Chruch. One wall in the church's entryway is painted black and carries a long list of the names of teenagers and children whose lives have been taken by violence in the sections of Boston surrounding the church. The names on the wall do not come up at the meeting, though they are not far from anyone's mind. There is a good deal of prayer and scripture reading. But this is not a midweek worship service. It is a business meeting. The people here are part of a program whose goal is to create 150 new businesses and 5,000 jobs in the next ten years. It is a key step in an effort to transform the economic landscape of this inner city.

Fourteen business teams are starting a 15-week training program run by the Christian Economic Coalition of Boston. Almost all the teams are attempting to start new enterprises. A few are hoping to expand or secure existing ones. An urban church sponsors each team, and in some cases the pastor is a member of the team. Each team includes people who live in the neighborhoods that were home to the young people whose names appear on the wall: Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. And all of them are committed to something more than personal economic security. They hope to take part in the revitalization of their communities.

One team plans to open a cooperative restaurant. A group of construction workers intend to form a cooperative so that they can bid on jobs in the role of contractor rather than simply work as employees for someone else. A team representing an existing recycling company seeks a strategy to expand and employ more people. Six women street preachers have covenanted to start a daycare center. As each of the teams shares its visions, several themes are repeated: "We need to show our young people that education and hard work do pay off." "We want to employ the young men on our streets." "We want to make our neighborhoods attractive again." "We want to strengthen families by working with children and their parents."

The excitement this evening may be hard to justify. For all the dreams and dollars expended on it, inner-city economic development has run the gamut from ignominious failure to success of the most negligible sort. As the New York Times reported: "Conservatives love it. Liberals love it. Foundations love it. The churches love it. But of all things undertaken in the inner cities, the one most likely to fail is community economic development." Or as one longtime activist put it, "I've flushed more money down the toilet of economic development than I care to remember." Another explained: "We're good at community development. But for 20 years we have failed at entrepreneurial development. The most we seem able to do is market our neighborhoods to outside corporations." The goal of locally owned, locally managed and locally staffed businesses has remained a dream.

WHAT IS different about the Christian Economic Coalition? The answer can be found in part by turning from the inner city to international development. One of the most successful and innovative Christian-based international development agencies is Opportunity International. Opportunity adopted and refined a microloan philosophy, helping to establish partner agencies in more than 40 countries around the world whose modest loans have compiled an enviable record in both job creation and repayment of those loans.

For some time Opportunity has contemplated an even more daunting challenge: economic development for poor communities in the U.S. The organization's board members were well aware of the many failed attempts in this area, and they were also aware that they could not simply transfer their international model to the urban U.S. Something new was needed. A task force was established to seek the most promising existing model. Opportunity eventually settled on the work of the Christian Economic Coalition in Boston as having the most potential to transform the economics of the inner city.

Roger Dewey, CEC's executive director, has been developing his vision since 1968. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Dewey felt God's call to address both society's racial divide and the needs of the city. CEC emphasizes church-based, self-help economic progress through cooperative ownership of local businesses. The coalition's leadership comes not only from residents of the inner city, but from the churches of the inner city. Many people from the suburbs--including bankers, lawyers, businesspeople and professors--participate in the coalition, but they function in the spirit of what an earlier CEC structure called a board of servants. Decision-making lies in the hands of a board composed almost entirely of inner-city pastors and church members.

CEC is a rich mix of realism and vision. The board and staff include people who have had the experience of developing a business from scratch to multimillion-dollar status, and also people who have seen their enterprises go under more than once. They do not subscribe to the notion that everyone has what it takes to start a successful business or to handle key managerial roles. They recognize that nearly all new businesses (in any community) fail because of bad business plans, inadequate financial record-keeping, unrealistic projections, tax and legal problems and insufficient credit or capital. In the inner city, these ordinary hurdles loom even higher, partly because of the lack of resources in the community and partly due to discrimination and suspicion on the part of established institutions.