Mixing religion & business

Commonweal, June 2, 1995 by Ralph R. Reiland

What are the chances of upward mobility for a group of poor, black church people--percent 96 on welfare--in rural Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation? What is their prospect for economic success if they don't get a dime from the Ford Foundation, the Fortune 500, or from rich celebrities and athletes? Or assistance and set-aside contracts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?

That was the situation of the Greater Christ Temple in Meridian, Mississippi, a church founded in 1959. In 1977, it initiated its REACH program for economic independence. The program began with peanuts--literally: Church members bought peanuts with their food stamps and resold them in the church basement. Now they own a gas station, two motels, three restaurants, a housing development, four thousand acres of farmland, a thousand head of cattle, a hog operation, two chicken farms, two meat-processing plants, a construction company, a steel fabricating plant, a school, a clinic, and a nursery.

"We stopped the `crayfish syndrome': when you put all the crayfish into a pail, one starts out, and all the others reach up and pull him down," says Bishop Luke Edwards, the pastor of the church. "There's no welfare or food stamps now. We're saving the federal government $300,000. Still, blacks come out here and look around and say, `Some white man must be behind all of this.'"

Green Acres is the congregation's new fifty-four-acre housing subdivision in Utaw, Alabama. One-hundred-and thirty-two homes are being built for sale to the public. Heritage Construction--a business owned and operated by the congregation's members--supplies the heavy equipment: eighteen-wheelers, backhoes, dump trucks. Also in Utaw, the church runs a motel.

Then there iS ACE (Accelerated Christian Education), the congregation's K-12 boarding school. On top of math and reading, students learn how to run a hog farm and operate restaurants. They regularly outscore their counterparts in state schools. Recently, the local juvenile courts ordered twenty-six kids to enroll for a straight dose of rehabilitation. The school's rules aren't complex: no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, no weapons, no TV, and no dating. And it's lights out for students at 8:30. Midnight basketball isn't needed here.

There have been setbacks along the way. As Bishop Edwards likes to note, "There's no easy road to success." The local government, for example, has served up costly mandates and even conducted investigations. Eleanor Walker, office administrator at REACH, says that "investigations and regulations by the welfare department and the Department of Human Services have forced us to spend a tremendous amount of money" on things like restroom changes and more fire equipment. "Some of it," she says, "seems like harassment." She adds that a big disappointment has been tensions with some leaders in the local NAACP: "It's an ideological split. Bishop Edwards believes that self-reliance comes from a conservative approach, self-help, and less dependence on government. The NAACP iS totally the opposite."

"Black people," says Edwards, "can be just as successful as anyone else, but our leaders have entrapped us in government handouts. I lived in those neighborhoods. Welfare broke up the families, put the father out of the home, and let another man lay up there all he wanted. Handouts robbed our people, robbed them of their self-respect."

The bottom line at REACH is to focus on opportunities rather than on obstacles, says Edwards. "Racism is an excuse. It's a song. No, the playing field isn't even, but we make it even. We proved we can make it in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation, and Alabama isn't far behind. Think what we can do in New York or Chicago. Look at the Cubans out in the ocean coming here. It is the land of opportunity."

What's at work in Meridian, Mississippi, and Utaw, Alabama, is the basic belief that every person is created in the image of God, a bottom-line conviction that values both the Ten Commandments and the 3-Rs, starting with people's spiritual values before their skills, and emphasizing less dependence and more plain business sense. Maybe it is a prescription to reverse the deadly disease gripping America's inner cities.

A black bishop who doesn't look beyond the poor community itself for salvation, who sees potential business success in the faces of his flock, may seem naively out-of-step. To those watching from the ground, any bird that is out of formation risks being seen as misguided. But maybe it is the rest of the flock that is off the track.

Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College. He owns Amel's Restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.