Pamela Foohey is the Curtis Bradbury Keller Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She is the author of Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive.
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Bankruptcy Has Helped Some Black Churches Bounce Back
How congregations have used Chapter 11 reorganization to survive predatory lending.
STEVE BROWN DESCRIBED Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, the church where he had served as a trustee for many years, as being in “the poverty-stricken area of Daytona Beach [Florida]. We’re in the ’hood, in layman’s terms.”
When I drove to Daytona Beach in April 2024 to take pictures of Shiloh’s sanctuary, I continued past the church and into its neighborhood. As I headed toward train tracks that bear freight for the Florida East Coast Railway, I passed businesses and houses with bars on first-floor windows and air conditioners hanging out of upper-floor windows. A few people were taking shade under trees.
Trustee Brown had told me that Shiloh’s congregants were “financially strapped,” as they had been for most of the church’s 100-year history. But that doesn’t stop this church of more than 200 members from offering services to those in the area. According to Brown, each week its soup kitchen feeds between 70 and 100 people, a program that Shiloh continued during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it set up tables in the parking lot. “We didn’t want to stop it,” Brown said, “because a lot of people depend on” the church’s outreach.