Ep 11 - How Dr. DeForest B. Soaries Jr. Broke the Mold of Ministry, Money, & Politics

In this episode of The Ministry Exchange, Rev. Dr. DeForest B. Soaries Jr. reflects on a ministry and public life that spans nearly three decades at First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens, service as New Jersey’s Secretary of State, and the creation of the groundbreaking dfree® Financial Freedom Movement.

Shaped by mentors like Rev. S. Howard Woodson and Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Dr. Soaries shares how faith, politics, and community development intersected in his calling—and why financial freedom became central to his ministry. He also opens up about his unique role in the gospel music industry, managing artists like Tremaine Hawkins, BeBe & CeCe Winans, Commissioned, and Fred Hammond with a focus on stronger contracts, fair treatment, and theological integrity.

This conversation explores:

• The origins and impact of the dfree® movement
• Why pastors and churches must address money openly and honestly
• Lessons from balancing the pulpit and public office
• Behind-the-scenes insights from managing gospel artists and protecting their work
• Practical steps for financial sustainability and pastoral care

For pastors, leaders, and communities seeking both spiritual and financial freedom, Dr. Soaries offers a powerful blueprint for ministry that transforms hearts, households, and entire congregations.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Guest Introduction
• 4:42 Family Roots and Harlem Church Culture
• 12:45 Mentors, Theology, and Activism
• 20:50 Learning Leadership at Shiloh
• 28:55 Call to First Baptist & Proctor’s Influence
• 36:10 Politics, Party History, and Governance
• 46:35 Reforming Church Culture and Accountability
• 55:10 Sponsor Message
• 56:20 Music Ministry to Industry: Managing Gospel Greats
• 1:08:15 The Dfree Movement Origins and CNN Moment
• 1:19:40 Teaching Tithing Through Financial Strategy

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, and welcome uh brothers and sisters to this uh podcast, this edition of the Ministry Exchange with Dr. Mapson, uh a podcast that is designed to uh have uh authentic uh and real conversations concerning uh ministry, ministry yesterday, ministry today, and ministry and ministry tomorrow. Um we are glad that you're able to join us and to engage in these conversations and we try to bring uh to the podcast uh persons um whom I know will be of a great value and blessing to us. And we are having said that, we are delighted today to have in our midst the Reverend Dr. DeForest B. Sorres Jr. Um Dr. Sorres is uh retired pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey, where he serves uh faithfully over a period of uh three decades. He is also the founder of the debt-free financial freedom movement, which is a groundbreaking initiative helping individuals and churches to break free from debt and to build lasting financial stability. Uh, Dr. Sorres served as uh New Jersey's Secretary of State from 1999 to 2002, becoming the first African-American male to hold that office. Uh, he is also the president and CEO of Corporate Community Connections Incorporated, uh, helping to guide corporations in corporate social responsibility and community impact, uh, something that, of course, uh is in the headlines today. Dr. Sories is the author of 12 books, including the bestseller's Say Yes to No Debt and Say Yes When Life Says No. He's been inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers at Morehouse College. Um and um again, we're delighted to welcome him uh who is not just a brother and a colleague, but a friend of many years. We have to go back uh to some beginnings and in days in in Newark when um uh we favored each other to the point where people would come up to me and say, Are you Buster Stories? Right. And uh, you know, I I got tired of saying no. And so they just want to ask me, Are you Jesse Manson? Right, right, and uh never said no. And uh one one of the great uh restaurants there black owned was Stewart's on uh Lyons Avenue where uh you know you'd go to Stewart's and you would uh you would see somebody or everybody at some point. Everybody, every at some point during the week. Um and uh and so over the years uh you know we developed a real deep friendship and and uh grateful to you for that for that friendship. I do want to I I want to begin um with your beginning in terms of ministry. Uh we are both uh sons of of preachers and pastors. Um what what was it like uh in terms of of coming up in the home of a pastor? Um tell us a little about a bit about your family, your father, um and and those beginnings.

SPEAKER_02: 4:06

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. You've had all of the giants in in the black church, and I'm just thrilled to be in that number. Um absolutely. And and this podcast outreach, I'm sure you're learning, is a unique uh platform for ministry. It's not about becoming famous, it's about um broadening your reach. And I'm very proud of what you're doing and so thrilled to see the responses. People are talking about this all over the country. My grandfather was a Jamaican immigrant. And what's interesting about that statement is that we came up in the 60s, we watched Alex Haley's Roots, and so we have a strong sense of being the descendants of people who were enslaved. And it really wasn't until later in life that I realized that my history and my heritage includes immigration. My grandfather came to New York through Ellis Island and moved to Brooklyn. And when I was Secretary of State, I actually went to Ellis Island, searched the archives, and found the card that he signed upon entering the country. Is that so? As an immigrant. And he had six children. After his sixth child, he had a stroke and was bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. And so my grandmother basically raised her children as a single, single parent. And my father of the six children was the one who became a minister. My grandfather was a minister, he was Seventh day Adventist.

SPEAKER_04: 5:52

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02: 5:53

And what's interesting about the Seventh-day Adventist movement was that in the 1930s, the largest Seventh-day Adventist church in the country was in Harlem. It was a black church led by a bishop named Bishop Humphrey. And Bishop Humphrey took the position that if blacks could not go to Seventh-day Adventist nursing homes, if blacks could not go to Seventh-day Adventist colleges, if blacks in the Seventh-day Adventist movement were treated the same way blacks were in the 18th century in the Methodist Church. He did what Richard Allen did in Harlem. He pulled out of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination and started a new organization in Harlem. And it was in that organization that my grandfather served and supported the movement to pull out. So there was a black Seventh-day movement separate from the Seventh-day Adventists, and that's where I grew up in Harlem. I see. Yeah. So before I was even born, just the seeds of resistance, the DNA of protest and independence were in me without me even knowing it. So my dad became a minister in the church that my grandfather founded in Harlem, right down the street from Abyssinian. Oh, I see. And so as a child, I was one block away from Adam Clayton Powell Jr., didn't realize it. I knew the church was there. We had members of our church, for instance, our musicians played for Mother Zion AME Church, and uh her husband played for a big Presbyterian church in Brooklyn. So I was really raised in the black church culture of Harlem and Brooklyn, New York. My dad was an educator, however. He was, like most pastors today, bivocational. So he served as a pastor, but his income, the way he fed the family, was by teaching and then later as a school administrator. So I grew up in the home of educators and clergy. We were in church, and as you know, the Seventh-day movement is quite strict and uh legalistic. We didn't eat pork, we didn't go out on Friday night, we couldn't play baseball games on Saturday, and it was very restrictive. And the older I got, the more I became frustrated with that structure. But more importantly, I became theologically curious about our doctrine because, again, you had Martin Luther King Jr., Wyatt Walker, Ralph Abernathy, and others who were also Christians, but their Christianity translated into activism around social justice. Right. Whereas our tradition was more uh legalistic around rules and regulations. And so when I became of age, I wanted to explore how other Christians were able to read the same Bible we did, but come to different conclusions in terms of lifestyle and activism and advocacy. And it was really Jesse Jackson who introduced me to the broader social gospel activist theology.

SPEAKER_03: 9:17

Yeah. What then what was it like um making that transition? Um how how did your was your father still living then? I mean, when you made the transition. So when you made that, that's a that's a tough, uh courageous move to not necessarily reject that, but to say I need more, and and then to become uh what we call a missionary Baptist.

SPEAKER_02: 9:47

Sure. Well, I became an activist in high school. So I was living at home, my dad was pastor, and I was active in forming a black student union at Montclair High School in New Jersey. I was active in helping organize a voter registration drive to elect the first black woman who became a senator, Wanola Lippmann in New Jersey. So my dad saw my activism and really respected it. When I decided that I wanted to go into ministry, my dad literally sat me down and said to me, Don't let our church pay for your education. And I asked him why. And he said, Well, if if we pay for your education, you'll be obligated to us after you finish school. And I think you're gonna want more options than that. So my dad had a broader view of religion even than his own church affiliation. You have to know that Sam Proctor was one of my dad's mentors in the educational realm. But he followed Dr. Proctor also in terms of his ministerial and theological perspective. My dad had gone to Bloomfield when it had a seminary. So he had been exposed to theological education. And I think had he lived beyond his 47th year, you know, he died young, he uh was the victim of medical malpractice. I believe my dad would have also transitioned out of the Seventh-day movement and joined, at the very least, Seventh-day Baptist. Because he was very Baptistic in his preaching. His one of his best friends was D.C. Rice. Yeah, in Montclair. Who I claimed to learn was also the pastor for Sam Proctor in Virginia. Is that D.C. Rice baptized Sam Frocker. Get out of here. And D.C. Rice was one of our role models in Montclair for leadership and preaching. Absolutely. And then he was good friends with Bill Gray, who had who succeeded D.C. Rice in Union. Yeah. And Calvin Sampson, who was at St. Paul's Baptist Church in Montclair. Right. So my dad had had a rich network of clergy friends outside of his denomination. Even the Church of God in Christ. We were very close to Kelmo Porter, who was Church of God in Christ before it became bigger. That's right, he was. And then his success in Norman Prescott. So I grew up around a lot of preachers. And of course, my grandmother was the mother of the church that Bishop F. D. Washington pastored in Montclair before he went to Brooklyn. Before he went to He was in Montclair before he went to Brooklyn. Yes, he was. He ate dinner at our house every Sunday. Wow. So I had this rich tapestry of exposure theologically, and it I believe influenced my thoughts to be more inclusive than some of the more rigid, legalistic religious traditions of my church.

SPEAKER_03: 13:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 13:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 13:04

So you even before we didn't even get to S. Howard Woodson yet. No, we haven't gotten there yet. We haven't gotten there yet. But uh yeah, those those who what I also learned was Harry Emerson Fosdick was in my class at Montclair before Riverside.

SPEAKER_02: 13:21

First Baptist Church. I walked past that building every day on my way to high school, which was on Church Street and pastored by Harry Emerson Fosdick, who I later learned was one of the major influences on my mentor, Sam Proctor.

SPEAKER_05: 13:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 13:37

When Proctor talks about his own theological perspective and his grounding based on his education reading, he always cites Harry Emerson Fosdick and his book, How to Read the Bible, as a major influence on who he became. So all of these exposures and influences converged and became a part of me in ways that I could not have orchestrated myself.

SPEAKER_05: 14:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 14:06

And and Fosdick being a liberal theologian, probably the most impactful and most popular theolog uh uh uh clergy person of his time.

SPEAKER_05: 14:18

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_02: 14:20

Without he was, I would call Fosdick the successor to Rousenbusch.

SPEAKER_05: 14:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 14:24

In terms of theological impact and progressive slash liberal theological interpretation. Right.

SPEAKER_03: 14:31

What did he say? Uh preaching is truth through personality or something or something. Wow. Yeah. Okay, that then that then we get to um we get to tr to Charlotte Trenton.

SPEAKER_02: 14:47

Right. But before we go there, my my dad was so disciplined that even today, 50 years after his death, I can think about how my dad would approach either preaching or leadership or family and take from his example and apply them to my life. For instance, my dad would go to the church on Friday night and preach his entire sermon to the empty building. Is that so? Yes, sir. When my dad died, he he left a catalog of typed sermons. In fact, I was so unprepared to be a pastor because his death was so sudden and the church shocked me by asking me to stand in. The first year or two of my of my pastorate, I was preaching his sermons. I was wearing his robe and preaching his sermons. But he was so disciplined and structured that again, to this day, his influence on my life is something that's that's ongoing. When I was working for Operation Push, Jesse Jackson started Push in 71. I went to Push in 73. Uh, Dr. Woodson, who was the pastor of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, a very, very successful church. He had been the president of the state NAACP, right, while being pastor. And then he was elected to state legislature while being pastor, and in the 1970s was the first black speaker of a state legislature, right, country. Right. And we when he became speaker, I was working in Operation Push, and I called Harry Batts and Lawrence Roberts and a few other pastors. And we went to Trenton to pray with him in his speaker's office and to offer our support and to let him know that we had his back as preachers and as black people. And that formed a friendship. His assistant, Jackie Holzendorf, became a liaison and he would start inviting me to preach at Shiloh, uh, often at the last minute. In fact, it was it was very interesting because one of my dad's friends was Arthur W. Jones, yeah, pilgrim baptist in Newark. And who was all who was at Zion here? Who was at Zion? That's right, in Philadelphia. Philadelphia. And what Dr. Woodson would do, because he and he and uh Dr. Jones were best friends, he would call Jones. And Jones would call me, and Jones would say, Woodson needs you. And often it would be on Saturday night because Woodson would have to travel or something else would happen. And they knew I was free on Sundays because I was preaching on Saturday, right? So I was a frequent guest at Silo Baptist in the 70s. When I first started, I could barely preach. And Woodson befriended me. I went to college with his son, Howard. And Howard and I never became great friends, but we were good friends. But Woodson, as it were, adopted me as another son. And I was as close to Woodson in many ways as his biological son.

SPEAKER_05: 18:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 18:08

So Woodson adopted me in the mid-70s. And so when I finally decided to go to seminary at Princeton, I went back to Shiloh to say to Dr. Woodson, it would be painful for me to have Princeton send me to a small white Presbyterian church to do my field education, my internship. So what I'd like is to do my internship at Shiloh, and that's how official institutional relationship started.

SPEAKER_03: 18:36

I see. I see. That's how it was a Philadelphian. Oh, Philadelphia. He's a Philadelphian. And was a member of uh Mount Zion, Mount Zion on Woodland Avenue, and was a candidate for that church. Was he? And was was rejected in favor of maybe Hiawaffa Coleman or somebody. But just, you know, look at God closing that door. That never would have that he not go.

SPEAKER_02: 19:02

Who would have been in silo who would have right, right, absolutely. And he and loved and admired MM Peace. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: 19:10

And and MP family asked him to preside at MM Peace's funeral. Is that right? He presided.

SPEAKER_02: 19:17

And he was a Philadelphian to the core.

SPEAKER_03: 19:19

Yeah. Yeah. But then that that's a continuation then of that social justice um uh um uh protest that was already in you, right? You you didn't get it when you got to Shiloh. You was it was already there, and he and he it seemed like he just was the perfect mentor for you.

SPEAKER_02: 19:46

Well, he was because he brought together the religious world, the civil rights world, and the government world. Yeah. But what I learned from Woodson more than anything, besides his preaching, because he was a great preacher. Yes. But the way he led Shiloh Baptist Church. Leading a large Black Baptist church is an art unto itself, and you can't learn it anywhere except in a large Black Baptist church. Right. I I've got two seminary degrees, and I didn't learn anything in either seminaries equivalent to what I learned from S. Howard Woodson at Shadow Baptist Church. When you sit in a board meeting with a pastor like Woodson, and you've got trustees and deacons around the table, there is something that happens to the person in charge that words can't describe. Yeah. And you have to learn it on site. You have to be there. You can't read about it in a book. You have to understand how you handle the deacon who disrespects you in public. Yeah. You have to handle the trustee who wants to put you in your place. Right. You have to handle the group dynamics of people who would never confront you individually, but when they get in a group, they kind of gang up on you. And no one handled that better than this Howard Woodson. Yeah. And so when I became Secretary of State, for instance, and people said, Well, have you ever led a major department of state government? I said, No, but I bet a Black Baptist pastor. If you could do that, you're qualified. State government is a piece of cake. Qualified. You're qualified.

SPEAKER_03: 21:34

Wow. And that that's experience there positioned you then from what you learned to accept your First Baptist.

SPEAKER_02: 21:45

Yeah, I didn't want to go to First Baptist. Right. They wanted you. They loved you. My predecessor loved you and the church loved you. I did not want to go there, but First Baptist is in a small section of Franklin Township, Somerset. And Sam Proctor lived in Somerset. That's right. Sam Proctor moved to Somerset when Rutgers offered him a teaching job. That's right. And the whole time he pastored at Abyssinia in Harlem, he lived in Somerset. Right. So he commuted from New Jersey to New York to be close to Rutgers. Two of the leaders of First Baptist were students at AT when Proctor was president, a deacon and a trustee. And when C.H. Brown retired, those two went to Procter to ask for a recommendation. And at that time, I was working on my doctor of ministry degree at United Theological Seminary as a Proctor Booth Fellow. And Sam Proctor recommended me. I didn't want to go there. And he said, if you don't go, I'm kicking you out of your doctorate program.

SPEAKER_03: 22:57

And he could say that too. He'd just say what whatever he wanted to say. And there's yeah, yes, Dr. Procter. So Proctor orchestrated that.

SPEAKER_02: 23:06

And that's how I ended up at First Baptist Church in Somerset in November of 1990. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 23:13

Yeah. Small church. Um and and I've known First Baptists obviously years and years and years. Wha you know, how did how do you navigate a second though, because your your father, your father is gone at an early age, and and that vacuum um is there. And I suppose that Woodson, maybe and others kind of help feel that. But uh as a as a preacher's son, you know, we we share that that aren't there moments when you you wish your dad was alive to see what you become. Every day.

SPEAKER_02: 24:00

And and to every day. Uh and my mother helped my mother's still alive. She's 94. And my mother always comments that she wishes my dad had lived long enough to see what I've become. Yes. And I think about it, especially since I still gleaned from him because of his strictness and his thoroughness and his discipline. Um, but when my dad died, I was 24. And I did have relationships. I had uh Harry Batts at Vessiah Baptist Church, who generously allowed me to use his office as the operation push headquarters for New Jersey in the 70s. I had um Calvin Sampson, who had been a friend and who, in my mind, was the greatest preacher I'd ever heard in my life. Yep. He was and people in Montclair would go to funerals to hear him preach, even if they didn't know the deceased. Yeah. But I really didn't have um a father figure in my life. I had S. Howard Woodson, of course, who taught me about leadership and preaching and government. But when Sam Proctor came along, which was about 12 years after my dad died, Sam Proctor was more than a professor. I was a student at Princeton. He came as a visiting professor. And I took his class, but I didn't realize how he felt about me until he literally invited me while I was a student at Princeton to give a lecture to his undergraduates at Rutgers. He had been following my civil rights career. And of course, you know that Jesse Jackson had been a student at AT when Proctor was president. Proctor and Jesse had a relationship. So Proctor knew who I was. Proctor taught my dad in the Rutgers graduate school of education. So for me, for me to have a relationship with Procter was beyond my wildest dreams. And he really took me in. He embraced me, and he became the father figure that really pulled all of those other relationships together. And the gap was finally closed from the time my father died because I really didn't have one person who I admired and I trusted and who had taken that much interest in me. So Sam Proctor really became my surrogate dad until he died.

SPEAKER_03: 26:38

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about politics, politics, and um being Secretary of State, pastoring First Baptist, and and and what that was like. And being Republican. And again, I think we need perspective, historical perspective, because we we tend to look at the moment and and not see the moments behind us. The Republican Party was the party of black people because of Lincoln, up probably until Roosevelt. Roosevelt uh and his policies with black people and then Kennedy. Right. But but uh a lot of our black leaders, including black preachers, including my father, right, were Republican.

SPEAKER_02: 27:36

Right. Arthur Jones was Republican.

SPEAKER_03: 27:38

Absolutely. Daddy King was was Republican. Uh when the Republican Party was not the Republican Party of today, and when there were liberal voices in the Republican Party, the the Civil Rights Bill would not have been passed without the support of liberal Republicans because it was the Democrats and the Dixocrats who didn't want the bill. Right. Right. So so we we ought to kind of look at what the times were like and and the idea that that as black people we need to be uh at both tables. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 28:17

When when possible. I'm not sure it's possible today. Right. It's on a federal level. Right. But I mean, to your point, in New Jersey, the first state that made it illegal for um to do investments in South Africa because of always was New Jersey. It was New Jersey. 1984. In New Jersey, when we were trying to reform the state police, the party that advocated for reform the most was the Republican Party. I've been a Republican, now I'm an independent. And I think what what you're what you're expressing is my view is that we have to be less emotional and more strategic when it comes to politics. You know where my church is, my First Baptist is right on the border of two counties, Somerset County and Middlesex County, and divided by a state highway. So when I when I led the effort to build a new sanctuary, I had to get approval from people in Somerset who were all Republicans. And people in Middlesex were all Democrats. And the state highway was controlled by Republicans. So by the time I got to First Baptist, I had to have good, strong relationships with Democrats and Republicans. Now, I pretty much stayed out of politics, and I distinguished between politics and government because I didn't have to run to be secretary of state. I was appointed by the governor. I didn't think she knew enough about black people, poor people. Urban people or young people. And so I supported her opponent. But after I supported her opponent, she came to First Baptist to say, listen, I don't know enough about black people, poor people, urban people, or young people, and I'd like your help. And I said, if there's ever a time when I disagree with you, if I have access, I'll disagree privately and not publicly. I won't embarrass you if I have access. And for four years, many of us, including Reggie Jackson, who led the Black Ministers Council and others, we had access to a Republican governor in ways we had not had access previously to any governor.

SPEAKER_04: 30:40

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 30:41

And when she ran the second time, we actually endorsed her. Many of the black preachers in New Jersey endorsed Christy Todd Whitman for governor. And a year in when the Secretary of State resigned, she asked me to be Secretary of State. And when I became Secretary of State, I had a lot to say about urban policy, access for black people to state government. And it was a great relationship. While she was governor, we thought that she would at least be considered for vice president when George W. Bush ran. And the far-right wing religious leaders in the Republican Party basically told George Bush that if Christy Whitman is your vice president, we won't support you. So the religious right really killed her candidacy, which was an eye-opener because many of us see Republicans as just Republicans. But there was as much division in the Republican Party. And those were the early days of the far right really holding the rest of the Republican Party hostage. And it became very unfriendly for black people and certainly for a black person like myself. So it became no longer even strategically wise for me to identify as a Republican. And that's when I became independent. But I I think as a people, we have to understand that neither party has had us as their priority. Absolutely. And like Jewish people, like the growing Hispanic population, like women and other special groups, we we need to be negotiating on behalf of our communities and our people in light of where we are today. Bill Clay, who recently died, congressman from Missouri, wrote a book way back. And the name of the book was No Permanent Friends, No Permanent Enemies, Permanent Interests. And while many of us say that, we don't really practice that. And I think we have to be much more strategic as we think and act politically.

SPEAKER_03: 32:48

Yeah. Yeah. Then in in terms of the the the politics, pastoring a church, there's always pushback from some people about pastors' involvement, which for you was more government than politics, but perceived and some and jealousy. You know, which you you would not say, but I I will say um because there was some there were black leaders who um uh objected to your prominence as being a ri a Republican, even though you were doing more for the cause than than they could do. And I guess that's always a part of it. But then in our churches, I mean um you you know, you've taken First Baptist uh a part of that for me when I look at First Baptist, but First Baptist used to be. I remember when First Baptist had about 10 choirs. Right. Right. Or at least there were more more choir members than than church members. That's right. And they and and you know, and that just wasn't maybe there, but choir members would in this choir would only come on their Sunday to sing, right? Certain people would only come to hear their choir sing, and every choir was its own little church. That's right. And the with his own office and the organist was the pastor. And its own treasury. Yes. They had their own bank accounts. Absolutely. Absolutely. My first church, there there was more money in the clubs that's right, than we had in the central treasury. So we had to move to it.

SPEAKER_02: 34:31

Yep, yet because the biggest club was the Usher Board, yes. And so they had the most money. And the president of the Usher Board was married to the treasurer. So there was an inherent conflict where we tried to convince all of the treasuries to come into the central treasury because the biggest treasury was married to the treasurer. And it took some time and no accountability. No, not at all. No accountability. No, they would meet every year at the end of the year to vote on how much of the money they will give to the church. So, yeah, we had all of those dynamics to deal with, and we had to do so patiently, lovingly, but firmly, because you can't build um, you can't build a strong church when the ministries and clubs and auxiliaries functioned as it were as little mini churches, to your point. They all had constitutions. Every club and the church had a constitution. The church had no constitution.

SPEAKER_03: 35:36

Yeah, yeah. We used to find uh bank accounts of when people died. Right. My first search, people died. And the relatives would come and say, Oh, we found this, we found this savings account.

SPEAKER_02: 35:50

That's right. In the church's name. But I'll tell you this: if you look at our history, it's both the challenge for the new pastor. Yes, but it's the legacy of the black church. It is. Because it was those funds that were used to bury people that didn't have insurance. Right. Those funds were used to pay people's rent to avoid eviction.

SPEAKER_05: 36:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 36:15

Those funds were used to cover medical expenses for people who couldn't afford it. So the lack of accountability, when you really look at the history and do a deep dive into what happened, really made for a survival mechanism for black people.

SPEAKER_05: 36:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 36:34

And there was a time in my life when I looked down on that and and thought it was just sublime ignorance. Yeah. And people like um H. Dean Trullier and other scholars really helped me understand the depth of the black church as not just a place where people do silly things, but a place where God has used what looks from the outside like chaos to be an arc to protect us from the tidal waves of oppression and abuse.

SPEAKER_03: 37:07

Yeah, and and the black church was the only thing black people had. All we had. I I say that Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Newark, my dad's church, my home church, would not be the church it is, would not have built in 1957 were it not for the Alabama Club, the Georgia Club, North Carolina Club, Virginia Club, North Carolina Club, Cycle Club, who competed. Yes, sir, you know, and and raised money and and sold chicken dinners, fish dinners to build that church. And I and the and the people used what means that they had, uh, and and just and then now to uh and see now where is God trying to take us now? Right. Beyond that. And we start talking about tithing because I grew up, I mean, there was no talk about tithing. Dues. All dues. Dues. Right. Paying my dues.

SPEAKER_02: 37:59

That's right. Yeah. The the genius of God is that unlearned, unlettered clergy, yeah, um, non-professional workers, people coming out of enslavement were able to piece together based on a biblical message that had been distorted. An institution that literally helped the four million who came out of enslavement turn into the uh 30 some odd million we are now. And to the extent that we have any success, we have any sanity, we have any hope, it's based on what God did to the black church. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 38:51

No question about it. And and that migration uh after World War II, after World War I, my my parents included after World War II, by the thousands coming from the south, from the farms, coming to for for a better life with faith and hope, and bringing the institutions with them and values. Right. Right. Is is that's the foundation on which we we serve. I mean, and those the you know, younger pastors who come after us, it's already there. And what are you gonna do with it and how will you how will you navigate in terms of of a contemporary church and times uh by not doing what put uh Trump does using a a chainsaw and destroying, but building on that. And like you say, lovingly, uh getting building relationships. We talk about that a lot on the podcast, building relationships, uh, so that people will begin to trust. Uh when when the installation takes place and and they give you the keys, you know, you you don't have the keys. Yeah. That's right. Those are just keys. Yeah, you but the pastor. You become, and and you and you, and you earn the keys because you earn the trust of people who are willing to say, I'm gonna I'm gonna follow you uh and let you lead me and let you care for my soul.

SPEAKER_02: 40:30

And and what what you do as a corollary to that is to understand uh who these people are. One scholar called the black church the surrogate world. And a lot of these things, the flower club, the Mississippi Club, if if if you're not loving and caring and integral in the way you transition out of that old cultural tradition into a new paradigm of ministry, you're really destroying people's lives. It's not just a matter of using pastoral authority to impose change. Yeah. It's a matter of helping people outgrow things that are somewhat anachronistic, but they are they have value to folks.

SPEAKER_03: 41:36

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SPEAKER_02: 42:41

That's all they know. That's all they know. The woman, we we uh if you came to First Baptist just before I left, you would notice that probably everything in the church, the music ministry, the Sunday school, everything, including the facilities, was different, except the women's auxiliary. The women's auxiliary when I left in 2021 was exactly what the women's auxiliary was when I got there in November 1990. Because to touch that would have been to do injury, psychological, emotional, spiritual injury to the people who were there, and I left them alone. I didn't bother them. They didn't bother me. I left them alone.

SPEAKER_03: 43:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Let let's, you know, this is this is rich. This is rich. Let's let's shift a little bit to um um uh music. Uh and you're uh managing Fred Hammond, Marvin Sapp, the Winins and others, um the you know, the business, and and again, um we we are in charge of the music and worship in the church, even though we may not be musicians. Right. Uh well you're a musician. I'm not a musician. Yeah, yeah. But but I mean, even if I weren't, right, it's it's our pastor that too. But but I want to be equipped to do that through through some knowledge of music and et cetera, like that. And and you have that uh which is taking you into this this avenue of the business side of uh of of of of uh some of our uh impactful singers. What what is what is that like and how did that how did that come about?

SPEAKER_02: 44:42

It's very interesting. When I did work for Reverend Jackson, one of the unique things about him was that his influence and his reach and his relationships extended into every sector of black life. And as a follower for Dr. King, you know, Harry Belafonte, Mahame Jackson, Dr. King was well known for having attracted entertainers who not only marched with him but raised money for him. Absolutely. And Reverend Jackson inherited a lot of those relationships and expanded. And so when I worked for Push, because I was the national director of Push, and my final role was national coordinator of Push, I interacted with uh Roberta Flack, um the Jackson Five, and then later Michael Jackson with uh Shaka Khan, people who just came around, and Isaac Hayes, Barry White, all of these people were around Push, and Reverend Jackson knew them, I knew them, and I saw from the inside some of the workings of the black music industry, mostly RB. And what I realized was that RB was basically black talent and white money. When CBS wanted to get into black music, they basically hired a couple of black executives who stole Motown artists, who stole Stax Record artists, who stole Sussex records artists. So in the 60s, we we had these black music labels, and by the 70s, the black artists who were on those labels ended up being signed to white labels. And then when the white companies signed the black artists, they fired the black executives. So by the time we got into the 80s, there were very few black executives left on these labels that used the black executives to steal Michael Jackson and others to the white labels. When a friend of mine called me and said that he was managing Edwin Hawkins and he needed some help, I went out to California to meet with the Hawkins family because Edwin's younger brother Walter had made this gospel record that had just blown up. And they were singing Gone Up Yonder, Unchanged. And Walter's wife Tremaine at that time were just, they were like celebrities. They were, they, they were packing out stadiums. And my friend Dwight McKee from Chicago, who had also worked with Revin Jackson uh as a younger guy, he said, Listen, you know, I need your strategic mind to help me help them. And so I became a kind of uh advisor to the Hawkins family. And Walter Hawkins pulled me aside one day and said, Sorry, my wife needs a solo career, and I'd like you to help her. And so I got with Tremaine, I became Tremaine's manager, and we signed a contract for Tremaine to do her solo album, and that that was the album that had Holy One, and and and Tremaine just blew up. Because I had Tremaine, I I met BB and CC Wise. BB and CC actually opened for Tremaine one night here in Philadelphia. And one of your outstanding promoters uh left the theater without paying BB and CC.

SPEAKER_03: 48:21

Which happened a lot in Philadelphia, in Newark. And Newark.

SPEAKER_02: 48:25

And so BBC were literally with their mom behind the theater with no place to go, no tickets, no hotel. So Tremaine and I picked them up and took them to a hotel, got rooms for them, and BB called back and said, Look, we need a manager. So I ended up managing BB and CC wine, signing their first contract for their album. And because they're from Detroit, Commission was in Detroit, and Commission knew that I was managing BB and CC and their records were doing well, their career was blossoming. And so Fred Hammond called and said, Well, you know, Commission needs a manager. And when uh I managed commission, it was time for Fred to do a solo career. So that's how it kind of parlayed from one artist to the other artist. And the point, the point was this that I had three objectives. Objective number one was to help these young gospel artists make a living singing gospel and not be ripped off by either record companies or by promoters. The second was to help them maintain some spiritual integrity while they were singing gospel, because as you know, there are religious leaders and artists and personalities whose offstage and off-mic presence is somewhat contradictory to the message that they say. And then the third was to help them expand musically to ensure that more people would be exposed to their music through both production and marketing. So that's how I got involved in music. My goal was to help expand and upgrade gospel. Prior to that time, Andre Crouch had really been the only what we'll call crossover gospel artist where more than just the black church heard it. And our music was so good, and so many of the RB artists had come out of the church. Absolutely. My goal was for contemporary gospel, the style of gospel that that Fred Hammond and Commission and others did would become more mainstream. And so we in the 80s really launched what is now considered to be the contemporary gospel genre. And I'm very proud of the contribution we made to that.

SPEAKER_03: 50:42

Which which means maintains the integrity of the church too, and and the message. The message of the theology of the church, too. Because that could can be lost, uh, particularly by some of the producers you're talking about who may not want the name of Jesus in a song, you know, for profit reasons.

SPEAKER_02: 51:05

Right. Um well, I always tell uh the church leaders and and and even artists, we will not outworld the world. Right. The church is not in competition with the world. We are an alternative to the world. Christianity is not in competition with the secular society. We're an alternative. And so if we do us well in terms of integrity, in terms of production, then God will do the rest. There are times excuse me, there are times when when people have thought they had to downplay the core of the gospel to be heard and accepted outside of the church when the most successful have proven that you don't have to do that. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03: 51:58

Yeah. Let's shift again um and talk about your work. Um this the book that uh you have here called Say Yes to uh Say Yes to No Debt. Say Yes to No Debt. Um how how your I remember uh Soledad O'Brien. Right, CNN. What year was that? That was like 2010. 20 wow. I remember that that segment that ri really brought to the fore this whole uh this vision of yours.

SPEAKER_02: 52:42

Right, kind of maybe began how I mean and well CNN uh under Soledad O'Brien's leadership had done a series called Black in America. Yes, yes. And they had done two segments, and after the second segment, they really received a lot of uh feedback, I'll call it, from people who said, How can you do anything on black in America? And you have not mentioned religion for the church. And so they decided they needed to do a third edition of Black in America, and they went around the country um soliciting names of churches that they could use to create this kind of montage collective update on what the black church was doing now. Their vision was to have um footage from the civil rights movement and then examples of churches that are doing things today to update the world on what the black church was doing. So our church's name was on the list, and they were going around the country looking at churches, and they would visit on Sunday morning. And when they came to our church on one Sunday morning, they heard people stand up in the middle of service and testify. They had paid off their mortgage, they had paid off their car notes, they paid off their student loans. This was in the middle of the financial crisis, the global financial crisis. And they were shocked, the producers were shocked. So they called Soladet and said, You got to go to this church. So Soledad came to church, and she heard people testifying that they've written their wills, and because what we would do on Sunday morning, we would stop the service and ask for testimonies for people who were going through our program. And people were testifying about all of the great financial victories they were having in the middle of this meltdown where every place else, people losing their cars, losing their houses, and losing their minds, literally. So Solar Dad took my wife and myself out to lunch and she said, you know, we had planned to do this documentary on quote unquote the black church and have four or five churches. Uh, how would you feel if we just did it on you? And I was scared to death because what when a majority media outlets decides to do an hour-long feature on a black church, it's scandal. They're looking for scandal. It's not sexy enough. And so I said, I'll get back to you. And I literally went back to my leadership and said, CNN wants to do an hour-long feast on us. And I'm nervous about that. And we prayed about it. So I went back and said, okay, here are the parameters. And if you're willing to abide by these parameters, then we'll do it. And so they said, Well, we want to follow three families and uh help us identify the three families, one young person, one married couple, and and someone who's having a problem with employment, and and and have them talk about how you help them and what the church is doing for them. So that's how it came to be. And that was the year, I think you'll recall, there were some coal miners stuck underground for about a month, and then they when when they came out, it was world news. That was the number one viewership on CNN that year. We were number two. Almost 15 million people saw this special. And like you just recalled, there are people who call us today and said, I saw you on TV. We'd like to bring that here. That was 15 years ago. Yeah. So it was the power of media.

SPEAKER_05: 56:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 56:32

And after the CNN special aired in 2010, focusing on this ministry we'd been doing since 2005. We launched D Free in 2005. And we were just doing it to help our church members and the community. Right. In 2010, it blew up, and she said, You better get ready because we're putting you out there. So I took off the month of August that year and wrote the book, the first book. And she was right. By the next year, people were calling from everywhere. I mean, every, all over the country. Denominations, Delta Sigma, Theta Sorority, just everywhere. So I wrote the book, then we followed up with a workbook, then we did a website. We just kept building and building and building to the point where today we can help any church and any church member, any company, any employee really take control of their finances and do it in a way that changes their lives and not just their money. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's powerful. That's powerful.

SPEAKER_03: 57:42

But you can't plan things like these. See, you can't sit down.

SPEAKER_02: 57:45

You didn't sit and say, oh, I'm going to do this and this. You can't do it. I didn't call CNN and say, listen, I'm doing something great. You should cover me. I was just doing what I believe God told me to do. And that was this. Listen, you can quote the Bible all you want. You could teach tithing all you want. But as long as our members are paying last month's bills with next week's check, as long as we're using credit cards as though it's income, as long as we're paying late fees and living without budgets, we are not going to convince people that tithing is possible. Right. You can pray about it, you can preach about it, you can teach about it, but tithing assumes that you have a strategy for your finances because tithing is a strategy. It's based on math. And if you don't deal with the other 90%, then talking about the 10%, it just goes over people's heads or bounces off of their off of their minds. So that's what I learned. I grew up in a church that quoted the Ten Commandments every week, and the minister quoted Malachi 3.10 before every offering. But the reality is tithing is personal, it's private, and you don't even know, even if people say they're tithing, they're tithing. Absolutely. You're not looking at their W2s, their tax returns, right?

SPEAKER_03: 59:13

Some people thought think you're tithing because you you bring money and put in the tithe boxes.

SPEAKER_02: 59:18

That's right. Because that's what ends up.

SPEAKER_03: 59:20

So whatever you, whatever the amount is, if you put it in there, you're tithing. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Uh-huh. But then the whole economic impact, um, even on the even on the church and and the resources that the church has. So because I want to talk about um talking about pastors in terms of finance and right and churches and and um um why is it that there's such a hesitancy to talk about one one reason is because we know we're always accused of talking about we can say right, we can say one sentence about about money and what we accuse. That's all that's all we talk about when we talk about is money, right? And and the other part of that is then, you know, preachers getting all the money, which that's right which is a lie as well.

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:10

So we're very yeah, we're very um intimidated, I think, by the criticism. Yeah. And the media, uh, the the TV preachers have done us a disservice because they distort the reality of the fact that the average, the average, the median income for clergy today is$37,000. Bus drivers make more than$37,000. You can make more than$37,000 working at a fast food chain. Absolutely. Um the majority of the clergy in this country have a job outside of the church. But the image of preachers with jets and preachers with megachurches and and the like dominates the cultural mindset for clergy. And so it's hard for clergy to talk about finance because they don't want to be lumped into that category. Um it was it was hard for me. That's really where this book and this ministry came from, because what I what I was concerned about was a lot of these TV preachers were getting money from my members. Yeah. They had to be absolutely. And I needed an alternative to what is commonly called the prosperity gospel. Yes. That does have as its goal prosperity, but the methods and the rationale and the results of prosperity are different. And and really, I prayed hard about this because I was um I was so upset with certain TV networks that featured these preachers that made Reverend Icke look mild. You know, we were coming up. If somebody called us Reverend Icke, it was an insult. Yes, absolutely. It was not a compliment. Absolutely. But today, we've got preachers that make Reverend Icke look like Dr. King. I mean, they they make Reverend Ike look very mild.

SPEAKER_05: 1:02:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:17

And what I didn't want to do, which which I'm very disturbed about today, is that it build a ministry on attacking other ministers. Right. And I see too much of that today. I see too much of ministers attacking other ministers either on doctrine or on something else. On social media, too. I mean, so it's like social media is it's blown up. Yeah. I mean, the way you get a following is by criticizing other ministers. And I think there's enough work for all of us to do. Yeah. There's enough crime, there's enough sin. There's enough hatred to focus on that.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:53

And and we don't need to talk about uh all preachers who are in fraternities are going to hell, sir. I thought I threw that in.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:01

I don't think we need that. No, yeah. So I prayed hard and and I really pulled uh Doc, I really pulled on my organ, my community organizing background, my social gospel background, my personal responsibility commitment, my my commitment to building strong Christians in relationship to God through Christ, put all of that together into a financial strategy. Because finances are deeply spiritual. I'll give you an example. The Bible says that God will supply all of our needs, right? But if we never distinguish between our needs and our wants, we we might be angry at God for not supplying our needs when in fact what we thought were needs were really wants. Right.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:57

More of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:59

Yeah, I thought I needed a Cadillac when I became a preacher.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:02

Uh Arthur W. Jones drove a Cadillac, Woodson drove a Cadillac, uh B. M. Johnson, what I love B.M. Johnson. He drove a Cadillac. So I thought I needed a Cadillac. When all I needed was a car. So a lot of my challenge when I started out, which I talk about in my book, is paying for what I wanted, often through debt, and not being able to afford what I needed. So what we have to do, I think, before we look at public policy, which is important, before we consider DEI programs in the private sector, all of that's important. But it's not a substitute for living within our means, paying our bills on time, not using credit excessively, and saving money for a rainy day, investing so that we can earn dividends, having money to retire. And what I do in this book that I had not done much of before is really pursuing strategies to increase our income. I mean, the fact is, I leaned so heavily into debt and reducing debt in the past that people think that's all we do. But the reality is you can have a budget, you can stop using credit cards, but it takes money to live. And the economy's shifting, AI is replacing people's jobs, uh, small businesses are coming up for sale now at a higher rate than ever before. And what I talk about now, as much as I talk about debt, is where the economy is going, what sectors we can shift into, where should we be looking for the future in terms of employment? You know, we'll always need plumbers. I don't care how much AI you have, I don't care how sophisticated the world gets. When you when you need a plumber, you need a plumber. And I think we've got to start really emphasizing opportunities, especially for younger people coming along, because it does take money. But when you get the money, you have to have a strategic use of money that makes money work for you and you're not working for money forever. Right. And it's deeply spiritual. Our work is based on scriptures. You know, the proverb says that a good person leaves an inheritance to his children's children. That means that when you die, you have more than bills to leave your family.

SPEAKER_05: 1:06:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:06:33

Says that the borrower is slave to the lender. Jesus said in Luke 15 that the prodigal son was prodigal, not because of immorality, but because of impatience, imprudence. He he he he he spent everything, didn't save anything. So the Bible gives us instructions, not just goals, but the Bible gives us instructions that can produce great financial outcomes. And that's what this book is about, and that's what our ministry is about.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07:06

You call it wasteful extravagance. That's what that's about being prodigal. Wasteful extravagance. That's right. It's not that not that he drank too much or that he's a big thing.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:16

Yeah, I always I came up in church. I thought prodigal meant chasing women, drinking liquor, and stealing money. But prodigal means wasteful extravagance. It means that I've got more shoes than I'll ever wear. Yeah. I've got more neckties. I was addicted to neckties. Yeah. I thank God for this new culture where we don't have to wear a tie everywhere. You know, I was buying neckties. I was so addicted to neckties. Is that what you mean? That that and I was so known for that. When Charles Booth came to preach a revival at my church, he demanded that I take him to my neckktie store because he wanted to buy neckties from the place I bought neckktis.

SPEAKER_05: 1:07:57

Yep.

SPEAKER_02: 1:07:58

Yeah. So and but I'm paying$130 for neckties while I'm in seminary. Now, what kind of sense is that? Right, right.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:05

Yeah. There was a time, of course, when uh our people didn't have benefits. So the pastors didn't have them. Right, you know, generation, like my dad, no, that didn't have retirement plans that, you know, the church uh uh paid into and and uh and health benefits and all of that. That's changed now with people having them. How do we how do we help our churches understand? Because here again, how much does the pastor say in his in his or her own defense of what is needed, which is the same thing other people need in order to live, but but the hesitancy and and and churches not understanding uh the need. There was a time when we lived in parsonages, right, right? And and you know, horror stories about church-owned property and all of that. Uh the new model, of course, is housing allowance. You you know, you give me a housing allowance, I live where I want to live, right, kind of house I want to live in, and I have my own investment, right? How do how do we help churches um in terms of the stewardship of of of the pastor? Um and and and then what do we say to pastors about their own finances? My dad used to say, and I I think he heard it from somewhere, one day an old man is gonna live in your house. Meaning you. That's right, that's right. And so, and so preparing for retirement financially, but then we might want to say a word about and and yeah, how you did it in terms of of retiring and walking away from and allowing the church to move on right without you, but that's two things.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:03

Oh, you said a couple of things embedded in the question. First of all, pastors and churches need two objective realities when discussing compensation. Reality reality number one is the cost of living in that area. That's number one. Because there are objective numbers. You know how much it costs to rent an apartment or to buy a house in Chicago. And if you don't start with the cost of living, then the pastor will be frustrated because the church is not paying enough. And the church in many instances will think they're paying too much. Yeah. So so I've created a tool and I use this tool. Um, I don't do a lot of this, but when I do it, I I start with what does it cost to live in your area? If it costs uh um to rent an apartment, uh$1,500 a month to rent an apartment. That's the cost. And you know you should only be spending 25 to 33 percent of your income on housing. And that means to afford to live in that city, just from a housing perspective, you need to be making$60,000 to$75,000 a year to afford that apartment. If you've got a wife and two kids. Now, that's objective fact number one. Yeah. Objective fact number two is that a church cannot afford to pay an unlimited amount of its income to the pastor. So if a church is bringing in um uh$300,000 a year, right? Right, and it costs$1,500 a month to live there, then the church can't give all$300,000 to the pastor. From an IRS perspective, the IRS will close a church down if they or any nonprofit, if if a percentage of its income goes to the pastor in excess of what's reasonable. And that's the word that the IRS uses, it's reasonable. And so you have to start there, right? Because if you start there, you have objective facts that take away the emotions, take away the personality, and a third party even could come in and say, look, this is the maximum this church, given this income, can afford to pay this pastor. And then to the pastor, here's how much money you need to live comfortably with your family in this community. And here's what the gap is. Now, how do you close the gap? And that's the second thing. There are things pastors can do besides preach Sunday afternoon programs to close the gap. There's chaplaincies, there's teaching at community colleges. There are, I have a list of 50 things they don't teach you in seminary that your seminary degree qualifies you to do to help close that gap. Because if you don't close the gap properly, you you will you'll be at odds with your board with your church and your board all the time. Right. You might be tempted to put your put your hand in the till, or you you might demand that the church pay you more than the church can church can afford. So that's number one. Then the second thing we have to do is talk about how do you grow the church's revenue.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:13:42

And there's only three ways to do it. The people who are giving, give more. The people who are not giving give something. And then you have new givers. And so you need a strategy for each. You need a strategy for the people who are giving to give more, because often we have people who could give more, but they're giving, they're still giving dues.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:04

Then we have a lot of high praises in the church that don't give anything.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:08

At all. Even when you when you walk around and and put money in in the bucket, they'll either give nothing or they'll ball up a$1 bill so tightly you need a train to pull it apart.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:22

And then ways to reach more people. Um so that's another answer. The other answer is that pastors have to be honest about what they need. Pastors have to have budgets just like everybody else. Pastors need retirement plans. There's a retirement plan, I think you're in it, where when you retire, you can withdraw money as a housing allowance so it's not taxed. Right. And that's the best retirement plan a pastor can have. That's my retirement plan. So when I withdraw money from my retirement plan, I don't pay taxes on it. And there's only one company that I know of that does that and it started out as a Baptist company. So it's the conversation, it's asking for help, it's having objective facts to compare your reality to and understanding what the real gap is and how to close it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:16

Yeah. That's that's good. And I think, I think also it's um how do we get to a point where a pastor doesn't have to fight for$2 more a week in every church meeting, right? You know, if there's a built-in mechanism, uh, you know, obviously the church is doing so that so that so it's not up doesn't cheapen him.

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:45

What I did at first Baptist Maps, and I I I eliminated the pastor's anniversary gift and converted it into a bonus. So at the end of the year, there there was a formula that the trustees used to objectively determine what my bonus would be. Uh-huh. And it was based on church growth, it was based on leadership ability, it was based on income growth. There were a number of factors, just like in the in the private sector.

SPEAKER_05: 1:16:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:15

And so it took away this issue of people sitting in the back room voting on money they were going to give me or not give me. Right. And if if the church members gave me a certain amount of money, the church treasury also gave me money. Right. We had no more discussions like this. It's been an hour, at least an hour. Debating over a$2,$2 raise. And then I had a compensation committee at First Baptist, and that committee was authorized to negotiate and set my compensation every year. It was not a church-wide conversation. Right, right. It was not a trustee-wide compensation or deacon-wide compensation. It was a committee, two deacons, two trustees, two church members at large, and someone representing my interests. And I met with them once a year, and we had compensation conversations based on the objective facts that owned it.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:09

That's good. Yeah, that's good. One of our friends, uh, the late um Gerald Thomas used to say that every seminary ought to teach ought to have a class for for prospective pastors in business and finance.

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:26

Absolutely. And many are.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:28

Many are starting to be able to. Many are starting to start in business and finance. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's in in closing. This has been a a rich conversation with you, my brother. Um, you retired. I wow, I didn't realize it'd been that long. Four years. Four years. Yes, sir. Well, you look you look good. I feel fine. I feel fine. Yeah, you say come on in, the waters are fine. Come on in. Um to in in terms of all that you've done at First Baptist, that those of us who know you, know the church, can can visibly see, and then in even internally, I I preached for you on several occasions of a wonderful experience. Uh, then you decide to retire um at the right time for you and and and walk away. You're not you're not going there. Not that you could anyway, because you're all over the world, but you're not going back and s sitting up in the front row every Sunday. You're not in going back for funerals. And I mean, talk about um how you reached that that decision um and and mentally and s and and emotionally were able to uh to say I've served my time and and I'm done and and let the church move on with another leader, and and I'm out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:01

I read a book once called Order, not um, I'm sorry. I read a book once called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of the habits begin with the end in mind. And so I began my pastorate at First Baptist with a vision for what the end looked like in terms of age, in terms of health, and in terms of ministry outcomes. We wanted to build a new sanctuary. I committed to doing that, we did that. I wanted to build institutions in the community, we wanted to do housing, we did that. We wanted to do economic development, we did that. We wanted to do foster care and adoption, we did that. And so I did my assignment. I did what I believe God sent me there to do, and I knew what that looked like in advance. So it's it's like driving a car. You're driving from here, and and New York is your destination. When you get to New York, you're in New York. You're in New Year. So I had reached my destination. Yeah. And only the pandemic extended my stay. I remember that, yeah. But but I had reached my destination and I I extended it because of COVID. And I had other things to do. I wanted to serve on corporate boards, I wanted to write more books, I wanted to go spend more time in Africa. But you had something else to do. Because I planned it. Absolutely. I worked along the way. Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't I didn't wait until I retired to look around and say, okay, what's next? Right. I started working on my what's next at least 15 years before I retired.

SPEAKER_05: 1:20:45

I see.

SPEAKER_02: 1:20:46

And I gave the church five years' notice. Well, I gave the leadership five years' notice. I gave the membership three years' notice that I was going to retire. And I invited all of the ministry leaders with gray hair in the church to retire also. So by the time my successor came in, he had a new chair for the deacon ministry, new chair for the trustee ministry, new leaders to work with because you didn't want people who should have retired holding on to their positions. Right. And the new pastor come in wanting to implement new ideas and new programs and new vision. So I I I prepared for retirement financially. I prepared for it emotionally. I prepared for it uh physically. I I I bought a house in Florida uh so to have a place to live outside of New Jersey. Right. Retirement is a process that culminates in an event, but it starts long before retirement.

SPEAKER_03: 1:21:49

Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. Um we we have been in conversation with uh Dr. Soris for these few moments that have been very rich. And thank you, uh uh my friend. You you you preached at Monumental also on several occasions. Last time you it was for our 198th church anniversary. It was next year's 200 for us. It was back 200. And and you preached, we were we were at a point of trying to um renovate our parking lot. I never forget it. You preached um was it Deuteronomy Consecrate or Exit Consecrate Yourselves for Tomorrow. Right. Yeah. Joshua. And that sermon ignited us, ignited me and us um to complete that task and and even kind of set us up for the two years leading to the 200th. Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow because the the the anniversary can't just be about yesterday.

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:04

Right.

SPEAKER_03: 1:23:04

And should not be. It's gotta be about tomorrow. Right. And and uh what will monumental look like uh 200 years from if a hundred years around, ten years from now. And and so um I I've always appreciated preaching that um helps us to be better people, and you've you've done that. So thank you so much for uh uh and and again I want uh I want us to to know about this book, uh say yes to no debt, and uh you're able to to go on the website and and purchase this book. It will be transforming for you in your lives, and and thank you for for the season that God has led you into with all that you're doing beyond which which is still an extension of of being pastoral uh in your in your continuing season. Um so thank you very much, and uh thank you for being a part of this episode, brothers and sisters. Uh, and if today's episode has been of value, we ask that you would uh subscribe to the Ministry Exchange so that you won't miss any episode. Thank you for being with us until next time. God be with you.