Faith Without Works: James 2:17 Is the Only Sermon Black America Needs Right Now

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. That is James 2:17, and it is a verse that every Black churchgoer in America has heard preached from the pulpit with the kind of fervor that suggests the preacher believes it applies to someone else. It is quoted at funerals and revivals, at Wednesday night Bible studies and Sunday morning services, and it has been the text for approximately ten thousand sermons in which the congregation is exhorted to demonstrate their faith through their actions — to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, do the work that the Gospel demands. And then the offering plate is passed, the benediction is spoken, the congregation files out to the parking lot, and the wealthiest, most organized, most trusted institution in Black America goes back to doing what it does most Sundays, which is primarily the business of sustaining itself.

I write this not as an atheist or a critic of faith. I write this as someone who understands that the Black church is sacred ground — that it was the organizing center of the civil rights movement, the shelter in the storm of Jim Crow, the one institution that slavery could not fully destroy and segregation could not fully control. The Black church earned its reverence. But reverence does not exempt an institution from accountability, and the accountability that the Black church must now face is this: it possesses resources on a scale that no other institution in Black America can match, and it deploys those resources primarily for spiritual sustenance and institutional maintenance while the communities it serves are drowning in economic deprivation that those same resources could meaningfully address.

The Wealth Nobody Discusses

The financial capacity of the Black church is, by any measure, enormous. There are approximately 59,000 to 65,000 Black churches in the United States, according to estimates derived from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research and the Association of Religion Data Archives. Their collective annual revenue, drawn primarily from tithes and offerings, is estimated at $17 billion or more. They collectively own billions of dollars in real estate — church buildings, fellowship halls, parking lots, and in many cases adjacent properties that sit unused or underutilized for six days of the week.

The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study documents that Black Americans are the most religiously observant demographic group in the United States. Approximately 79% of Black Americans identify as Christian, and churchgoing Black Americans attend services at rates that significantly exceed the national average. This is not merely a spiritual phenomenon. It is an organizational one. Every Sunday morning, millions of Black Americans voluntarily gather in buildings they collectively own, listen to leaders they have chosen, and contribute money to an institution they trust — a level of consistent, voluntary civic engagement that no other organization in Black America can replicate.

And here is the question that the reverence surrounding the Black church has made it nearly impossible to ask: What is happening with the $17 billion?

“If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

What the Church Used to Build

The question is especially painful when set against the historical record of what the Black church once accomplished with far fewer resources. In the decades following the Civil War, when Black Americans possessed almost nothing in material terms, the church was the engine of economic development. The African Methodist Episcopal Church built Wilberforce University in 1856 and continued to establish schools, colleges, and mutual aid societies throughout the Reconstruction era and beyond. The National Baptist Convention, organized in 1895, created a publishing house that became one of the largest Black-owned businesses in America. Black churches built hospitals when white hospitals would not treat Black patients. They established insurance companies when white insurers would not write policies for Black families. They operated credit unions when white banks would not lend to Black depositors.

This was not ancillary activity. It was central to the mission of the church as Black Christians understood it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the spiritual salvation of the individual and the material uplift of the community were not competing priorities. They were the same priority, expressed through different instruments. The preacher who built a school on Monday was not less spiritual than the preacher who only preached on Sunday. He was more so, because he had read James 2:17 and taken it literally.

The Modern Disconnect

The contemporary Black church, with some notable exceptions, has drifted from this tradition of economic institution-building. The majority of Black church budgets are allocated to three categories: staff compensation (pastor’s salary, associate ministers, musicians, administrative personnel), building maintenance and mortgage payments, and denominational assessments and charitable giving. What remains after these obligations is typically modest, and it is from this remainder that any community economic development must be funded — if it is funded at all.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research has documented that the typical American congregation, regardless of race, spends approximately 40-50% of its budget on personnel, 20-30% on facilities, and the remainder on programming, outreach, and denominational obligations. For Black churches specifically, the proportion dedicated to what might be called economic development — job training, financial literacy education, business incubation, housing development, workforce preparation — is, in most cases, negligible. Not zero, because many Black churches operate food pantries, clothing drives, and emergency assistance programs. But these are acts of charity, not acts of development. They address immediate need without building the capacity to eliminate it.

The distinction between charity and development is not semantic. It is the difference between giving a family groceries and teaching that family to build a business that can afford its own groceries. It is the difference between writing a check for someone’s rent and building affordable housing so that rent does not consume 60% of their income. It is the difference between praying for someone’s financial breakthrough and teaching them the budgeting, saving, and investment skills that make financial stability possible without divine intervention. The Black church excels at charity. It has largely abandoned development.

The Churches That Are Doing It

Before the critique overwhelms the possibility, it is essential to name the churches that have understood James 2:17 as an economic mandate and acted on it. They exist. They are producing measurable results. And they represent a model that could be replicated across the 59,000 Black congregations in America if the will to do so existed.

West Angeles Church of God in Christ, in Los Angeles, created the West Angeles Community Development Corporation, which has developed more than $200 million in affordable housing, commercial space, and community facilities in the Crenshaw corridor. The CDC operates job training programs, homebuyer education workshops, and small business development services. It has transformed blocks of blight into functional economic infrastructure, and it did so using the church’s institutional credibility, organizational capacity, and real estate as the foundation.

Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — Martin Luther King Jr.’s home church — operates the Ebenezer Building Foundation, which has developed affordable senior housing and community facilities in the historic Sweet Auburn district. The church has partnered with public and private entities to leverage its resources and its moral authority into tangible development outcomes.

Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn operates one of the oldest church-based community development programs in the country, including a nursing home, a credit union, an elementary school, and a clothing exchange. It represents the continuation of the nineteenth-century model in which the church was understood as an economic institution, not merely a spiritual one.

These churches prove what is possible. They also, by their rarity, prove what is not happening. If three churches can build housing developments, operate credit unions, and run job training programs, the question for the other 58,997 is not whether it can be done. It is why it is not being done.

A Blueprint for Economic Ministry

The model for church-based economic development is not theoretical. It has been tested, refined, and documented by organizations including the Christian Community Development Association, the National Congress of Black Churches, and the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. The components are straightforward:

Financial literacy as ministry. Every Black church with more than fifty members has the capacity to host a twelve-week financial literacy course. The curriculum exists — Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, the FDIC’s Money Smart program, and the National Endowment for Financial Education’s materials are all available at low or no cost. The venue exists — the church building sits empty six days a week. The audience exists — the congregation includes the very people who need this education most. What is missing is the pastoral decision to make financial literacy as much a priority as Bible study.

Community Development Financial Institutions. A church credit union or community development loan fund can provide the small-business capital and emergency lending that commercial banks will not offer in low-income neighborhoods. The model has been proven by institutions like the Opportunities Credit Union and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. A network of church-based CDFIs could redirect billions of dollars currently flowing to payday lenders and check-cashing operations into productive community investment.

Workforce development. Church facilities can host GED preparation, vocational training, resume workshops, and interview coaching. Congregants who are professionals — accountants, lawyers, human resources managers, business owners — represent a volunteer workforce of expertise that is already assembled every Sunday morning and could be deployed to mentor and train their fellow congregants at no cost beyond the organizational will to do so.

Small business incubation. Church-owned properties that sit vacant during the week can be converted into co-working spaces, commercial kitchens for food entrepreneurs, or retail incubators for emerging small businesses. The overhead has already been paid. The mortgage, the utilities, the insurance — these costs are borne by the congregation regardless. The only additional investment is the imagination to use the space for community wealth-building rather than allowing it to sit empty.

The Sermon That Must Be Preached

I understand why this conversation is difficult. The Black church is the last institution in Black America that has not been criticized to the point of delegitimization. The NAACP has been questioned. The Congressional Black Caucus has been scrutinized. The historically Black colleges have faced hard questions about outcomes and accountability. But the church has remained, for most critics, untouchable — protected by the genuine reverence that Black Americans feel for an institution that sustained them through centuries of oppression, and by the reasonable concern that criticizing the church from outside risks providing ammunition to those who wish the Black community ill.

“A civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
— James Baldwin

But James 2:17 does not contain an exemption for beloved institutions. Faith without works is dead — not dormant, not resting, not waiting for the right moment. Dead. And a church that collects $17 billion per year from a community in which the median household income is $46,000, in which the homeownership rate is 44%, in which the poverty rate is 20%, in which the unemployment rate is persistently double the national average — and deploys those resources primarily for spiritual programming and institutional maintenance — must confront the possibility that it is practicing the very faith that James condemned: a faith that sees the need, acknowledges the need, prays over the need, and does not meet the need with the resources it possesses to meet it.

This is not an argument against the spiritual mission of the church. Worship matters. Prayer matters. The ministry of presence and consolation in a hostile world matters enormously, and anyone who suggests that the Black church should abandon these functions in favor of becoming a social services agency has misunderstood both the church and the community it serves. The argument is that the spiritual mission and the economic mission are not in competition. They are, as the founders of the AME Church and the National Baptist Convention understood, complementary expressions of the same Gospel. The preacher who teaches a family to budget is doing the Lord’s work. The church that incubates a small business is building the Kingdom. The congregation that operates a credit union is practicing the faith that James describes — the faith that is alive because it acts.

Fifty-nine thousand buildings. Seventeen billion dollars. Millions of congregants who gather voluntarily every week. Professionals, tradespeople, educators, business owners sitting in the pews, possessing exactly the skills and knowledge that their communities need, waiting to be asked. The infrastructure exists. The resources exist. The need is beyond question. The only thing missing is the decision — the pastoral, institutional, denominational decision — to treat the economic suffering of the congregation with the same seriousness, the same organizational energy, and the same financial commitment that the church currently devotes to its building fund. Faith without works is dead. And the communities that these churches serve cannot afford a dead faith any longer. They need the faith that builds. The faith that invests. The faith that reads James 2:17 on Sunday and starts a financial literacy class on Monday. That faith is available. It is waiting. It has always been waiting. It needs only to be unleashed.