“I don’t know who is running your shop today,” Pastor Michael Jones, senior pastor of Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, said to Midwest BankCentre officials in an event space at his church on Wednesday, April 27. “Everybody from your team is here today.”
Indeed, more than a dozen bank officials – including Jim Watson, Midwest BankCentre president and CEO – attended the ceremonial groundbreaking for the new Midwest BankCentre branch at Friendly Temple in North St. Louis, St. Louis’ first community bank to be hosted by a church.
The branch will take shape in the 5500 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive at Belt Avenue in repurposed office space. It is scheduled for completion in August 2016. HisTime, LLC, an African American-owned firm, is project manager/architect. Construction team selection is currently underway.
The new branch will feature three indoor teller stations, customer computer kiosks, and a community meeting room with a big-screen TV, free WiFi and a whiteboard. Two drive-up banking lanes will be added, one of which will host a 24-hour ATM. Six professionals will staff the bank, which will become the bank’s fifth St. Louis city branch.
Midwest BankCentre, in business in St. Louis for 110 years with total assets exceeding $1.6 billion, is a locally owned community bank that provides financial services including commercial, retail and digital banking; business cash management; mortgage lending; and consumer lending. It is a local leader in the St. Louis Regional Unbanked Task Force and its Bank-On Save-Up St. Louis initiative.
Though Pastor Jones introduced the bank president by first name during his remarks, saying that he and the bank leader “came together with the same passion and vision,” Watson was never introduced at the event and did not speak – perhaps unprecedented for a CEO attending a groundbreaking in St. Louis.
The bank’s voice at the event was one of its African-American executives, Alex Fennoy, senior vice president-community and economic development director for Midwest BankCentre, whose office will be located at the new branch.
Fennoy said the partnership with Friendly Temple was inspired by Midwest BankCentre’s success in opening a branch in Pagedale in partnership with Beyond Housing and Mt. Beulah Missionary Baptist Church.
“In banking, we expect a retail branch to show profits in five years,” Fennoy said. “That branch in Pagedale showed profit in less than three years. So we wanted to be somewhere else in North City to replicate that process.”
Though Friendly Temple is just two and a half miles east of the bank’s branch in Pagedale, Fennoy said, they wanted to go into business with Friendly Temple because they need a solid community partner to make a retail branch work in an under-banked area. Within five months after his first meeting with Pastor Jones, he said, the bank was signing a lease agreement to put a branch on the church campus.
“I believe God is at the center of this partnership,” Fennoy said.
Fennoy said the bank also needs municipal commitment to make a retail branch work. In Pagedale, he said, Mayor Mary Louise Carter was supportive. In St. Louis, he said, Mayor Francis G. Slay also was supportive, though Friendly Temple includes two citywide elected officials who deal directly with money and finance among its 12,000-member congregation: Comptroller Darlene Green and Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones. Both attended the ceremonial groundbreaking.
Treasurer Jones said a legitimate bank branch on Martin Luther King Drive will help drive low-income consumers away from payday lenders to a financial institution that offers better financial terms.
“This is the first step toward getting rid of predatory lending by giving people access to fair and safe financial products and services,” Treasurer Jones said.
A 2009 study by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation revealed that the St. Louis metropolitan area had the highest percentage of unbanked blacks in the country and the largest disparity between unbanked blacks and whites. In St. Louis, a stunning 31 percent of black households were unbanked, compared to 1.1 percent of unbanked white households.
A church doing business with a bank, however, begs the question whether this follows or contradicts the example of Jesus Christ who, according to the Book of Mathew, kicked the moneychangers out of the temple.
“Jesus Christ went into a temple during a feast and was challenging the moneychangers in the temple on temple grounds,” Pastor Jones told The American in an interview. “We have a campus with four sanctuaries. The sanctuary is part of our campus, but so is the senior building, the child development center, Arlington Grove Apartments, the gymnasium. The bank will be on our campus, not in our temple.”
Pastor Jones pointed out that it was the predatory practices of the moneychangers that drew Christ’s ire.
“People who go to feasts offer sacrifices, but those who could not bring a sacrifice because of a long journey would purchase sacrifices on temple grounds,” Pastor Jones said. “The problem was not purchasing the sacrifices, the doves, the problem was the moneychangers were adding taxes, upgrading the price and taking advantage of the people arriving on the temple ground looking for a dove. They were abusing the opportunity to provide sacrifices.”
The comparison was clear: By inviting a legitimate financial institution onto the temple grounds, Friendly Temple was driving the moneychangers – the predatory lenders – out of the neighborhood.
“When the bank shows up,” Pastor Jones said at the ceremonial groundbreaking, “you close down the loan stores taking advantage of our people.”
A bank branch on the church campus also fits into the long-term planning of a spiritual leader with a keen interest in economic development. Since 1996, under the auspices of Robert Fulton Community Development, the church has invested more than $100 million in revitalizing areas bordering its campus. Pastor Jones told The American that it is his calling to develop the neighborhood surrounding a church his grandfather started in 1955 with three congregants.
“I think a bank on our campus will enhance our ability do our work,” he told The American, “to do ministry, to reach out to people, to do what we are compelled and called to do.”
