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Credit where it's due

Credit where it's due

My friend had an envelope put through his door recently, unmarked except for the small words ‘Speedy Cash’ on the front. When he opened it he found a number of flyers for the payday lender Speedy Cash advertising the many different ways you can borrow money from them at over 2000% APR. But alongside these flyers he found something altogether more sinister - a children’s colouring picture of the Speedy Cash mascot, Speedy Roo.

These kind of grim advertising tactics from payday lenders encapsulate the reason why we need a Church Credit Champions Network to help people access responsible credit from ethical organisations like credit unions.

Now of course many people will see the words ‘church’ and ‘credit’ and start to get worried. Bible verses about ‘rendering unto Ceaser what is Ceaser’s’ and Jesus turning over the tables in the temple have often been (mis)quoted to argue that the Church should steer clear of all things financial and instead focus on the core ‘spiritual’ work of saving souls.

Any serious engagement with Jesus and his teachings renders such an approach untenable. Jesus spoke more about money than any other topic, and chose to describe part of his ministry as ‘announcing the year of jubilee’ which in the Old Testament included the forgiveness of debts. In Scotland, where I grew up, churches pray ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’ in the Lord’s Prayer.

Even more fundamentally, Jesus taught his followers to love their neighbours as themselves, and such love surely cannot exclude material and financial well-being. The economic situation in the UK means that more and more people have to borrow small amounts for unforeseen situations – maybe a washing machine or a car breakdown, or an emergency trip back home. With the rise of payday lending from a £300 million industry in 2006 to a £3.7 billion industry today, we’ve seen the huge profits that can be made by exploiting people in these circumstances, and the trail of individual and family destruction left behind.

Many people end up at places like Speedy Cash because they think they have no other choice, but that’s not quite the whole picture. In most places in the UK now people will have access to a credit union – a local, mutual business that encourages savings and offers affordable short-term loans. The problem is that credit unions  simply don’t have the budgets to compete with the likes of Speedy Cash.

That’s where the church comes in. Local churches have everything you might need to develop the capacity and presence of responsible lenders like credit unions. They have people that want to save money ethically. They have people that need to borrow money and will pay it back. They have others with time and skills to volunteer, buildings in the heart of local communities and networks of relationships to local employers.

The purpose of the Church Credit Champions Network is to be a bridge between these many resources and the community finance sector. It will build relationships with credit unions and social enterprises in order to understand their current capacity and their needs, and it will work with local churches to identify and train ‘Credit Champions’ to take positive action – everything from telling their friends about the credit union to setting up a community bank in their church building. We will start that process in London and then also next year in Liverpool before hopefully rolling out more widely across the UK.

Examples like Murston Community Bank in All Saints Church in Kent and St James’ Church in Hackney show what can be possible with just some willing volunteers and a passion for the local community. We hope and pray that many more will be inspired to follow in their footsteps and see a little taste of Jesus’ spirit of jubilee coming in their neighbourhoods.

David Barclay is the Faith and Public Life Officer at the Contextual Theology Centre and the Senior Network Coordinator of the Church Credit Champions Network. 

Image by Ewan Munro from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence

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