By Marv Knox
An innovative Cooperative Baptist Fellowship racial repair endeavor has taught Black congregations the truth of “less is more” and demonstrated how they can strengthen their ministries by cutting back.
That’s what happened for Palmetto Missionary Baptist Church in Conway, S.C., Pastor Cheryl Moore Adamson reported.
Palmetto participated in the McCall Exploratory Process, a racial repair pilot project launched by CBF’s Emmanuel McCall Racial Justice and Leadership Initiative. Rev. Kasey Jones, CBF’s coordinator of outreach and growth, and Dr. Pamela Jolly, a former banker who consults with communities of color to understand how faith and finance impact each other, co-directed the process.
Palmetto jettisoned two of three signature ministries and modified the third. “Amazingly, by narrowing our focus, we learned we could better appropriate our resources to ensure we’re doing one thing very well,” Adamson said.
Congregations that participated in the McCall Exploratory Process demonstrated courage and vision, Jones said, adding that racial repair is vital for Black congregations “because we need to set up systems that are sustainable and replicable.”
That involves empowering Black churches not merely to survive, but to thrive by building on current resources to be stronger in the future.
For too long, Black churches have reflected Martin Luther King Jr.’s assessment of the Civil Rights Movement, she explained, citing a statement from Dr. King quoted by Jolly: “Although our actions were bold and crowned with success, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. The goals we set carried the blemishes of our inexperience.”
That “inexperience” perpetuated Black churches’ cycles of faithful and laborious ministry that fail to produce gain, Jones said, observing, “We work hard to be rewarded with more work.”
To begin rectifying that malady, the McCall Initiative engaged six Black congregations in the racial repair pilot project. In addition to Palmetto Missionary Baptist Church, participants were Central Baptist Church in St. Louis, Mo.; First Baptist Church of East Point, Ga.; Mount Vernon Missionary Baptist Church in Nichols, S.C.; New Morning Light Baptist Church in Conley, Ga.; and Remnant Fellowship in Morrow, Ga.
The project explored “how internal Black church asset mapping and external community asset mapping can be used to construct and design racial repair strategies and culturally relevant programming,” Jones said.
Asset mapping is a process of discovering the resources, strengths and tools available to an organization. In the pilot project, churches evaluated five types of “capital”—human, social, intellectual, cultural and spiritual—available to them, both within the congregations and in their communities.
They implemented a program called The NarrowRoad, developed by Jolly. The NarrowRoad is “a faith-based, culturally relevant approach to wealth-building in the Black community,” she noted.
At a retreat, Jolly taught teams from the churches to view themselves from not only a biblical/spiritual perspective but also through the lenses of business, finance and strategy.
Teams applied what they learned to writing proposals for grants of up to $10,000 from CBF’s McCall Racial Equity Fund. The grants are intended to support ministries that can transform both their congregations and communities while focusing on each church’s “most productive body of work,” Jones said.
Later, McCall Initiative leaders conducted site visits with the churches. “We listened to them and helped them fine-tune their understanding of their assets with the goal of writing stronger grant proposals,” she said.
“We framed the proposal process differently than most grants, which start with assessment of needs,” she explained. “I don’t like this (needs-based) approach, because whoever tells the worst story gets the biggest bucks. That becomes the narrative of that community, because it’s how the money shows up. But it also defines the community by its weakness and needs, not by its strengths and assets.
“With these grants, we didn’t want to hear negative stories. We wanted to learn what these churches could do with an investment that would move them to the next level of strength and vitality. We wanted them to narrow their focus, to choose one ministry that, with a small investment, would help them expand. We wanted to help churches get to the next benchmark in a trajectory of success.”
The grant proposals focused on the churches’ capital. They demonstrated how each grant would tap into human, social, intellectual, cultural and spiritual resources to build ministries that not only would do good now, but also would make the churches capable of doing even more in the future.
Palmetto began with the church’s current reality and future responsibility in mind, Adamson acknowledged.
“Part of our rationale was age: I’m 72-years-old, and the pastors who serve with me are 72 and 68,” she said. Quoting a fortysomething longtime community mentee, she added: “‘Old people die with their boots on, but elders pass the baton.’ I’m an elder, and I intend to pass the baton. We’re looking at a succession plan.”
Working that plan meant evaluating the three ministries for which Palmetto Church has been known—a produce store, known as CHOPS (Culinary and Hospitality Operatives Prepared to Serve), as well as an after-school program and a summer leadership camp, both for children and teens.
“We enjoyed operating CHOPS, and the community gained a lot from it,” Adamson recalled. “During the pandemic, we wrote a grant proposal and got $30,000 and launched two other businesses for African-American women, including a juicing store operated by two young women. In the process of considering what we did best, we decided to turn the CHOPS property over to them, and the folks who ran the other business decided to work out of their homes.”
So, the church released CHOPS but ensured a small business could continue to bless the community.
Palmetto also turned its attention to the two ministries for children—the after-school program and the summer camp—with an eye on sustainability. Both programs required huge investments of creativity, attention and time from Adamson, the other ministers and lay members.
Adamson was concerned about how Palmetto could continue serving children, especially through ministries that depended upon the identity of church leaders and volunteers. How could the small church sustain such time-intensive ministries when the people who founded and nurtured them retired?
“We had been salivating over the Children’s Defense Fund’s Freedom School,” Adamson acknowledged. “It’s a canned program that does not rely on our personalities and goodwill. We knew we could hand it off to others coming behind us.”
The grant enabled the church to train new staff and host its first six-week summer Freedom School for 30 students—“we call them ‘scholars,’ age five through 12th grade,” Adamson said—this year.
“So, now we are in the process of mentoring the next generation of leaders—a young couple, both professors at Coastal Carolina University, who have two sons in our program.”
The leadership handoff is progressive, she added: “We’re working to prepare our new leaders. They’re observing me. Next year, we will work together. The following year, I will watch them fly.”
Another assurance of how the ministry will soar surfaced when a local benefactor pledged a quarter of a million dollars to fund the Freedom School for five years. Narrowing and focusing “has made us and what we’re doing so attractive that other people want to be part of us,” Adamson exulted.
With the donor’s support, Palmetto is collaborating with a city program to provide social skills workshops and giving its young scholars exposure to and aspiration for activities on the Coastal Carolina University campus.
So, the church is reveling in the boost it received from letting go of CHOPS and the after-school program and focusing on the Freedom School, Adamson reported.
“The whole concept of going from ‘broad is the way to narrow is the way’ in what we supported gave us permission to make this change,” she said. “Now, we not only have survived, but thrived. This has put us on sure footing that we will have a legacy—not only in the community, but in God’s kingdom.”
That outcome echoes the reason Palmetto, which “goes way, way back with CBF,” participated in the McCall Exploratory Process in the first place, Adamson noted.
“Racial repair ensures African-American congregations are on sure footing about what they are capable of. It gives us an assurance of our value and of what we bring to the table. It provides a strong foundation for interacting with others.”
Participation in the McCall racial repair project provided the church with at least three solid takeaways, Adamson observed.
First, it deeply engaged the small church’s leadership in shared values, with one in five members participating in the process.
Second, the community asset map helped them identify additional resources—such as churches, government entities and local professionals—that could share in their ministry. “We learned we could be more creative in how we approach them for supporting our work,” she said.
And third, “this process brought us joy,” she stressed. “Of course, we could feel a sense of accomplishment. But we also could experience the joy of letting go and gaining perspective. We learned we had everything to gain and nothing to lose by engaging in this process.”