A Black Pastor's D.C. Support
for Economic Initiative

WASHINGTON (RNS)--It was a scene Bishop Harold Calvin Ray had dreamed about for months. Like some sort of Old Testament prophecy that had finally come true, Ray was basking in the glow of the moment--his moment.

Standing to his right was House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Next to him was Rep. Tom DeLay, the Republican whip. And pushing his way through the crowd to the podium was House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

The three House Republican leaders had come out on a chilly Washington morning to laud Ray's newest project, the National Center for Faith Based Initiative. For Ray, the message of the event could not have been clearer: He had found three high-ranking white Republicans to lend their names to a black pastor whose goal is nothing short of eliminating poverty in black America.

The subtext of the event was a little more subtle: If Ray could score this kind of endorsement, maybe he was on to something. For the 44-year-old preacher, it was mission accomplished.

Ray, pastor of the 4,000-member Redemptive Life Fellowship in West Palm Beach, Fla., launched the center in December and has signed on nine of the most influential black pastors in the country. Together they have a combined television viewership of 80 million people a week and have leadership ties to more than 50,000 black churches in the United States.

The center's main objective is to overhaul the way black America thinks about money. Its vehicle is the church, often the longest-standing, most reliable institution in the black community.

If Ray has his way, rank-and-file blacks will think twice about how they spend their money, put more focus on investing and venture online en masse to flex their collective financial might.

And in perhaps the most ironic aspect of Ray's Capitol Hill debut, the former lawyer-turned-pastor plans to do it all without a dime of government money.

"We are not looking to bootstrap another generation with government dependency," Ray said at his press conference. "We want to disavow and dissolve any notions of government dependency."

Instead, Ray plans to enlist the deep pockets of Wall Street and corporate America. He's been courting financial services giant Prudential to help get his center off the ground. His message is rather simple: Businesses that refuse to take us seriously may find themselves losing a valuable constituency--the $533 billion-a-year buying power of African-Americans.

It's a strategy that has caught the attention of a new breed of black ministers. Black clergy have always advocated economic empowerment for their flocks, but led by people like Ray, they are tapping unlikely sources that are largely non-governmental and historically have had little connection to the black community. We will take help wherever we can find it, they say, and if we have to break the patterns of the past to do it, so be it.

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