Pastor Focuses on Building Business Within Congregation

CHARLOTTE, N.C. —  Keith Hilliard made $320 a week working at a truck wash, but even on his and his wife’s combined salaries, he said, “we were barely making it.” So Hilliard decided to go into business for himself.

He was encouraged by his church pastor, who had started a campaign called “EARN Ministry” to boost entrepreneurs in his African American congregation. Before the sermon one Sunday, the pastor beckoned Hilliard to the pulpit and announced to the congregation that Hilliard’s Auto Detailing was open for business.

Now Hilliard waxes and buffs cars in his shop and has hired two teenagers to help him handle the lineup of compacts and trucks. He smiles as he leafs through yellow carbons in his receipt book showing that he regularly makes more than $100 a day, sometimes as much as $400.

“You know how sometimes you need a jump-start? My battery was kind of dead, and EARN Ministry recharged it,” said Hilliard, 32. “EARN put me on the map.”

In an era when government welfare cuts mean shifting the burden to churches and charities, black churches are anticipating increasing involvement in the seemingly secular mission of economic development.

Leaders of eight major black denominations representing 65,000 churches resolved at a meeting of the Congress of National Black Churches here last month to use their pulpits to expand job training and placement, to encourage small businesses and entrepreneurs, and to pressure public schools to prepare black students for a work world of computers and information technology.

“In almost every black community, the church is the oldest, strongest and most viable institution,” said the Rev. James R. Samuel, Hilliard’s minister and pastor of Little Rock African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which, despite its name, is located in Charlotte.

“One of the most pressing needs in the black community is economic empowerment. It becomes a natural leap of logic to connect the two.”

Like religious institutions of all faiths, many black churches across the country have undertaken initiatives that attempt to give poor people not just charity, but a leg up. Some build low-income housing, some tutor children, some provide scholarships and others try to keep people sober and straight enough to turn their lives around.

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The Congress of National Black Churches decided to focus on jobs, said Bishop Roy L.H. Winbush, the chairman, because having work that is meaningful and well-paying is vital to a community’s spiritual and economic health.

“You sure can’t turn to the government to do this job,” he said.

The unemployment rate for African American adults is consistently at least double that of whites, said Margaret C. Simms, director of research programs at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who met with the church leaders. Among the cities with the highest black unemployment are Los Angeles (18%), Chicago (16%), Philadelphia (15%), Baltimore (14%) and Washington (12%), according to recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In addition, African Americans tend to be overrepresented in the segment of the job market that is shrinking, Simms said: Black males make up 31% of unskilled laborers nationally.

Hugh B. Price, president of the National Urban League, told the ministers gathered here that this is an era in which even applicants for jobs on auto assembly lines must pass sophisticated cognitive tests.

“Preparing people for this new world is the ministry of this new millennium,” he said.

The recent overhaul in federal welfare programs could expand church involvement in economic development programs, experts say. Under the act’s “charitable choice” provision, states are encouraged to use charitable and religious institutions to provide job or vocational training, job-search help and high school equivalency programs, with the aid of government subsidies.

Samuel’s EARN Ministry--which stands for Economic Assistance and Resource Network--is a modest initiative that requires almost no funding. But based on the testimony of church members, it seems to work.

Samuel said that as a former banker and pastor of the church here, he saw his 1,500-member congregation “as more than a shepherd’s flock. I saw it as an economic base which could be mobilized to undergird the success of every business within that congregation.”

In 1992, he began collecting the names of all his church members who ran businesses, and many more, such as Hilliard, who wished to. By last year, Samuel knew of enough businesses to list 43 of them in a booklet he called the EARN Directory. Among them are accountants, mortgage lenders, house painters, computer consultants, real estate agents, hairdressers, an attorney, a piano teacher and a dentist. Every church member got a copy of the directory, and Samuel said he told them, “This replaces your Yellow Pages.”