Good Intentions Meet Poor Execution: Our Journey Toward Financial Wellness

The skills required to build something are not always the same skills required to grow and sustain it.

For more than two decades, I watched families in our congregation and community struggle financially—not because they lacked intelligence or ambition, but because they lacked access, knowledge, and the right tools. That reality drove me to do something about it. Looking back, I am proud of how much we tried. I am also honest enough to admit how much more we could have accomplished.

Our efforts began with programming. We adopted the dfree® Financial Freedom Movement, a faith-based framework designed to help people get out of debt and build wealth with intention. It gave our members a shared language and a practical roadmap. DFREE® wasn’t just a curriculum—it was a strategy and culture shift, and it took root in ways I still see bearing fruit in people’s lives today.

We supplemented that foundation with events. We regularly hosted financial workshops covering budgeting, credit, saving, investing, and retirement planning. We brought in experts. We filled rooms. We partnered with organizations and companies to offer resume preparation workshops because we understood that income is the beginning of financial health—you can’t build wealth without a paycheck. We helped members refinance high-interest mortgages and auto loans, putting real dollars back in real families’ hands. We offered financial literacy courses to both youth and adults because financial education is a gift that compounds over time.

These were good programs. They changed lives. But they were also, in a very real sense, events. People came, learned, and went home. The knowledge was real, but the institutional infrastructure to sustain long-term financial progress was missing. We needed something more permanent. Something the community could own.

So we built it.

We formed a community development credit union—and I want to be precise about what that means, because it matters. This was not a church credit union. It was a church-led community development credit union, open to residents of the broader community regardless of membership or faith affiliation. The vision was simple and powerful: a financial institution owned and operated by the community it serves, accountable to its members, reinvesting in the neighborhood rather than extracting from it.

The people who established that credit union were remarkable. They navigated the regulatory landscape, built the organizational structure, and launched something that most churches only dream about. They deserve enormous credit for what they created.

But here is one of the most painful lessons of my pastoral and civic career: the skills required to build something are not always the same skills required to grow and sustain it. The founders were visionaries and pioneers. What we needed next were managers, strategists, and operators. We did not make that transition well. We kept the builders in roles that required builders and growers, and the institution paid the price.

The credit union eventually was required by the regulators to merge with a larger credit union better equipped to serve our members. In one sense, that outcome was responsible—our members needed stability and service, and the merger provided both. But in another sense, it represented a profound missed opportunity. A community-owned financial institution, embedded in our low-moderate income neighborhood, accountable to local families, could have been a generational asset. It could have funded small businesses, provided affordable mortgages, and kept wealth circulating within the community rather than flowing out of it.

We let it slip through our fingers—not from lack of passion, but from a failure of governance and transition planning.

I share this not to dishonor the people who worked so hard, but because honest reflection is the only kind worth having. Faith communities across this country are trying to address economic inequality. Many are doing what we did—hosting events, launching programs, dreaming big. My counsel to them is this: match your people to the right roles and build the kind of institutional infrastructure that outlasts any single leader’s tenure.

We planted seeds. Some grew. One tree, which could have shaded generations, didn’t survive long enough to reach its potential.

That still matters to me. And I believe it is worth confessing.