Died: Carmel Jones, Black Banker for British Pentecostals
With a vision of Jesus, he started a credit union that enabled dozens of churches to buy buildings.
As far as anyone knows, Carmel Jones started the only financial institution in the history of Great Britain that began with a religious vision. But if Pentecostals aren’t supposed to start credit unions based on dreams about Jesus speaking to them on a church roof, no one ever told him.
“I had no one to guide me but God,” Jones said.
Jones, a Church of God in Christ minister who founded the Pentecostal Credit Union (PCU) in 1979, died on July 22 at the age of 85. He started the credit union so that Black pastors would have access to capital to buy churches. Today, it is the second largest in Great Britain, with about 2,000 members and nearly nine million pounds in deposits (the equivalent of about $11 million in the US).
The PCU has financed the purchase of dozens of church buildings, providing homes for some of the most prominent Black Pentecostal congregations in the UK, including the Assemblies of the First Born Church, the New Testament Assembly, New Testament Church of God, and Rauch City Church.
“He was the church’s Black banker!” said John and Penny Francis, co-leaders of Rauch City, in an interview with Premier Christianity. Their multisite London church “started with Reverend Carmel Jones, who gave us our first mortgage when our high street bank turned us down.”
Delroy Powell, bishop of the New Testament Assembly, recalled Jones as a “disruptive visionary,” who was far ahead of his time, figuring out how to use the financial system to benefit Black Christians.
Jones was born in Jamaica in 1936 in the Bye-berry district of St. Elizabeth Parish. He was the fifth of six children born to Roslyn Samms and Arthur Jones, a small farmer.
His mother raised him in the Anglican ...