What Comes after “When Helping Hurts”? Strategies for Economic Flourishing

Note: Adapted from Agents of Flourishing (IVP 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.

With the publication of Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett’s book, When Helping Hurts, congregational leaders have made important strides in critically examining their benevolence and missions investments. Many have learned that good intentions are insufficient and that much wisdom is needed in ensuring that benevolence leads to beneficent outcomes. As a result of When Helping Hurts’s advice, many churches have matured in their approach to benevolence and engaged in more fruitful initiatives and partnerships. The book has done more than perhaps any other modern resource to help congregations know what things to avoid.

But, as the authors themselves acknowledge, churches also need to know what things to pursue. Congregational leaders need a robust and creative vision of the positive ways their investments can bring healing, empowerment and new wealth creation for the flourishing of their communities.

This starts with congregational leaders taking a deliberate, 360-degree inventory of their church’s assets. We cannot steward well that which we fail to recognize we possess. Often when considering what they have to offer the community, leaders note only the volunteers they might mobilize for frontline service and the money in their benevolence or local missions fund. While vital, these are rarely the church’s only assets. Many churches also possess land, buildings, classrooms, playing fields, auditoriums, audio-visual equipment, large kitchens and dining areas, parking lots or parking structures, gymnasiums, musical instruments, financial endowments, credit-worthy standing, strong networks with other faith communities or nonprofit entities, relationships with local public officials and decision makers, respect in the community, a reputation for being a safe space, savings and checking accounts, and purchasing power. God has placed much in our hands!…

Building Human Capital

John Perkins, the iconic civil rights leader and founder of the Christian Community Development Association, has a well-known mantra: “People need Jesus . . . and a job.” Churches can help people build the human capital needed for sustainable employment through job training, networking, and job creation.

Job training. Churches desiring to provide help to un- and under-employed people in their communities do not have to start a ministry from scratch. Two similar national job-training programs offer curricula and training. One is Jobs for Life, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, the other is the Work Life program from the Chalmers Center in Chattanooga.

Four key components mark these programs:

A biblically based work readiness (“soft skills”) training course
Practical workshops on job-search skills (e.g., résumé writing, interviewing)
Support and cheerleading from volunteer champions who attend the classes alongside participants and also offer practical help (e.g., transportation assistance)
Partnerships with employers in the community willing to give graduates from the training program interviews when they have open positions….

Networking: Job clubs. To help people suffering from unemployment or facing career transitions, some churches are offering job club. A job club is simply a gathering of job seekers for mutual support and encouragement. Typically, it involves networking and some training – usually focused on such topics as the sectors of the local economy offering the best job prospects or the most effective job-searching skills….Menlo Park’s ministry has three components: small groups for job seekers, a monthly large-group meeting with speakers addressing various job-search topics and skills, and an online platform called “Career Action” that lists job openings and allows seekers to post résumés….

Job creation. Some congregations not only offer job training or job support but seek to create jobs. This is a strategy Overflow Church of Benton Harbor, Michigan, has pursued. Over the past twelve years it has helped to create around forty jobs….

In 2008 Bennett launched Overflow Christian Community Development Association (Overflow CCDA), a sister nonprofit to the church that could oversee the implementation of the congregation’s vision of fostering economic renewal. The congregation fully supported the effort. It paid Bennett’s salary while allowing him time to serve as the nonprofit’s initial executive director as well as their lead pastor.

Overflow CCDA involved other congregations from the start. “When you’re hungry and hustling,” Bennett laughs, “partnering is a necessity. We could only be strong in collaboration with others.” In 2015 Overflow CCDA changed its name to Mosaic CCDA to better capture the multichurch nature of the organization.

The first enterprise Mosaic launched was a resale store. It did very well, generating nearly $10,000 per month by 2011. “On one hand you had people who liked finding good garage sale type bargains and on the other, people who were willing to donate all kinds of used items,” says Andrew Robinson, Mosaic’s CEO. “It was the first secondhand shop in the neighborhood, and it was a hit.” By 2018 the resale store was generating $15,000 per month in profits. It has created between seven and ten jobs (depending on the year), most of them full time.

Mosaic Property Services (MPS) was the second venture. It provides lawn maintenance and snow removal services. Depending on the season, MPS employs twenty to twenty-five people. Ivy Yarbrough, 58, has been working for MPS for several years and credits Mosaic for turning his life around. A native of Benton Harbor, he grew up poor, with seventeen siblings. Jailed for selling drugs, his parole officer referred him to Mosaic for job training and coaching. Yarbrough says the church folks believed in him, and that enabled him to get off drugs.

Mosaic on Campus, the third venture, is the vendor providing meals in the cafeteria at Lake Michigan College’s Benton Harbor campus. This enterprise has created one full-time and four part-time jobs. Employees of Mosaic on Campus have the opportunity to become students in the college’s degree programs in culinary arts or hospitality management….

Jobs and job training for youth. Churches can also contribute to their community’s economic well-being by investing in young adults. The national unemployment rate for adults ages sixteen to twenty-four averaged 8.8 percent throughout 2019, compared with 3.1 percent for working-age adults. Among African American young adults, it was over 15 percent. Youth unemployment has high personal and social costs. According to the Center for American Progress, workers who are unemployed as young adults earn lower wages for many years “due to foregone work experience and missed opportunities to develop skills.”…

Building Financial Capital

In addition to building human capital in the ways already described, churches can contribute to their community’s flourishing by assisting individuals and their families to build financial capital. Three promising approaches to this are matched saving accounts, microlending, and enterprise pitch competitions.

Matched saving accounts. As noted earlier, most churches respond to poverty by offering short-term income and consumption supports: free food, free clothes, a check to pay the overdue utility bill or rent. Such relief is sometimes needed and appropriate. But often it’s nothing but a Band-Aid that helps people muddle through for another month or so.

By contrast, asset-building strategies can help people escape their poverty over time. When a family develops a savings account, it has a buffer against rainy days. And assets can create more wealth, such as when a house increases in value or a stock pays a dividend. Churches can help the working poor build up savings accounts by incentivizing the process through matched savings programs.

Typically, these programs combine financial literacy instruction or coaching with savings incentives. The organization hosting the program determines the level of match – it might be 1:1, 2:1 or even 3:1 for each dollar saved by a participant. Usually, funds are kept in a savings account registered in both the program participant’s name and the host organization’s name. Access to the funds requires signatures from both parties…

Microlending. Microenterprise lending has long been utilized by Christian and secular community-development agencies working in the developing world. Through an initiative called 1K Churches from the Criterion Institute, some US congregations are implementing a similar strategy. The project provides a curriculum that congregational small groups can use to explore biblical teaching on economics. Church members complete the study and then consider ways that they or their church as a whole could participate in redemptive economic investments….

Social enterprise competitions. For nine seasons ABC’s Shark Tank show has earned top TV viewer ratings. Fans tune in on Friday nights to watch inventors pitch their ideas to a panel of multimillionaire investors. A quick Google search reveals the popularity of pitch competitions, with dozens occurring all over the country. In 2016 I heard about a church version of Shark Tank (though an observer dubbed it “dolphin tank” for its much friendlier vibe). In 2017 I had the chance to visit Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, and learn about its impressive Innové Project that had given rise to eleven thriving social ventures….

Summing Up

For churches to make a meaningful, sustainable contribution to the economic lives of neighbors in their community, three movements are needed. The first is a movement from relief to longer-term, relational and holistic investment in the lives of those struggling economically. For too long churches have put most or even all their benevolence resources toward relief. And if we’re honest, we’ve got to admit that we often do so because it’s easier. Handing out food and money to poor people is more convenient and less messy than giving them ourselves, our time, and our talents….

The second is a shift from a needs-based approach to ministry to an asset-based one. We must start seeing not only the needs of the poor but also their assets. The nineteenth-century Evangelical poverty fighter Octavia Hill used to say that too often churches were ready to help the poor but not eager to know them. The same critique can be made today. Made in God’s image, every person has gifts, talents and creativity. An asset-based approach resonates better with this truth than does a needs-based approach….

The third shift is one from focusing solely on supplementing people’s income to helping them build assets. Churches can help people increase their human capital through training programs of many sorts that increase their marketable skills. We can also encourage their efforts to build their household savings slowly and steadily. We can make financial capital available to fund entrepreneurial dreams that allow our neighbors to deploy their God-given talents and hard work, helping them create sustainable revenue streams. We can assist people in achieving the dream of home ownership or a college education.

These three shifts will require intentionality, humility, sacrifice, risk and creativity. But, as the stories we’ve reviewed demonstrate, they are doable. They are also deeply rewarding because they hold the promise of genuine, enduring transformation.

Amy Sherman, director, Center on Faith in Communities; senior fellow, Sagamore Institute