Banks Wouldn’t Lend to Black Churches. A Jamaican-Born Pastor Started a Credit Union That Did

• Rev Carmel Jones, born in Black River, St Elizabeth, died in July 2023
• He registered the Pentecostal Credit Union in 1980 after reading a newspaper article
• It lent to Black churches and businesses when mainstream lenders would not
• Congregations including Ruach City Church used it to buy their buildings

Rev Carmel Jones, the Windrush-generation minister who founded the Pentecostal Credit Union, died on 22 July 2023 at St George’s Hospital in London, the organisation now known as Pentecostal Community Bank announced. He was born in Black River, St Elizabeth, Jamaica, one of six children of a homemaker and a farmer, and arrived in Britain at 17 in the 1950s looking for work.

His first experience of church in England was bruising. He attended an Anglican church in Clapham but was asked not to return because of racist treatment; in 2020, St Paul’s in Clapham publicly apologised. He went on to join a Pentecostal church, where he was ordained and remained a lifelong member.

In September 1979 he read an article in the Sun newspaper about credit unions. Seven months later, in 1980, he registered the Pentecostal Credit Union. At a time when Black Britons struggled to get loans from mainstream banks and building societies, the union became a source of finance for Black churches and businesses to buy premises. The tribute names Ruach City Church, New Testament Assembly and several AME Zion churches among those it helped, and describes the union as having become “one of the strongest credit unions in the UK”.

Bishop John Francis of Ruach City Church remembered him as someone who provided mortgages when traditional banks refused, calling him “a trailblazer, a pioneer, and a legend”. Jones also founded the New Assembly of Churches and RESCUE Training, which helped ex-offenders into work, and served as one of Britain’s first Black prison chaplains. He was married to Iveline for 65 years and had three children.

Many of the Caribbean-led church buildings that now stand across London and the Midlands exist because members pooled savings when banks would not lend. For Jamaicans at home and abroad, Jones’s story is a reminder that access to credit decides who gets to own property, and that churches have long been able to build their own financial institutions. As diaspora congregations and returnees look at buying land or buildings in Jamaica, a cooperative model rooted in the church is one they have already seen work.

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