c. 1998 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ It’s 10 o’clock on a snowy Saturday morning, and the speaker at Providence Baptist Church is urging his listeners to do more with their money.

Behind him, near the altar, is a wooden box engraved with the word “tithes.” But Byron Mason is not asking for money. He’s teaching how to use it wisely. And he’s at Providence Baptist this day because of the influence of churches in the African-American community.

Mason, who works for the Urban League here, wants his audience to start planning for themselves and their families. He wants them to reduce their debts, buy homes, and invest for retirement.

Moreover, he hopes some of them will start their own businesses and give jobs to other African-Americans. He wants black entrepreneurs to dominate headlines the way Bill Gates and Ted Turner do.

“We have to be responsible ourselves for creating wealth for our people, for creating jobs for our people,” Mason said back at his Urban League office, where he runs a program that teaches people about managing money.

“What we’re talking about is taking the economic structures of our communities back. … When you talk about unemployment in our communities, about underemployment, about drugs, about crime, it all comes back to that.”

Mason, 38, knows he can’t change things overnight, but he believes he’s called to start. He believes it enough that he left a lucrative job as a stockbroker to run the Urban League program.

“It’s quite a sacrifice,” said Myron Robinson, executive director of the Cleveland Urban League, adding that Mason earned much more as a broker than the $60,000 or so yearly the league now pays him.

Mason plays down the commitment.

“I certainly wouldn’t want to come up with some perspective like I’m Father Teresa,” he said, adding that he plans to return to the brokerage business in a year or so. He hopes to head his own brokerage one day, running one of those businesses he’s exhorting everyone else to start. Recently he helped his mother open a lunch counter.

By the time he returns to the industry, Mason will have devoted two years to his passion for financial education.

He’s not sure when he fell in love with it. As a high school student, he placed fourth in a state contest on investment knowledge. When family troubles brought him home from the University of Cincinnati just shy of a degree, he took a job as a teller at a bank because its offices were next door to those of Merrill Lynch, the brokerage firm.

“I figured, `Boy, if I could get close to Merrill, maybe I could get a job there,”’ Mason said.

He got to know one of the brokers, who was a bank customer. Merrill hired Mason as an administrative assistant in 1984.

“I kept beating on them: I want opportunity. I want the opportunity to be a broker,” Mason said. He got that chance in 1987.

After a few years, he left for another brokerage. In 1996, happy with his job but sensing a need to teach, Mason decided to preach his financial gospel full-time.

He felt called to advance the work of one of his heroes, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the late civil rights leader.

“It’s been said that … one of the last directions he was going to move in was the economic, or wealth-creation piece,” Mason said.

Like King, Mason is spreading the word through churches, historically a source of black power. A group of area pastors is the Urban League’s partner in the program, which has so far reached about 1,000 people.

Mason is disturbed by the vast disparities between blacks and whites. Blacks save half as much, have a total median income two-thirds as high, and have only one-tenth as much total wealth.

African-Americans need to own companies to reverse those numbers, he tells the crowd back at Providence Baptist. The Urban League hopes to start a venture fund that will invest in black-owned businesses. But first it needs to change attitudes.

“In the African-American community, there is a lot of economic illiteracy, and therefore, when you’re economically illiterate, you’re not going to make wise choices when it comes to investing and buying homes,’ said the Rev. Rodney Maiden, Providence Baptist’s pastor. “They never taught us as children coming up, and now we want to break that chain.”

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Mason’s seminars often turn into forums grappling with social issues. At the Providence Baptist seminar, a woman brought in a magazine article that quoted fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger saying many people in the inner city “would rather have a Rolex than a home.”

The comment angered some in the crowd until Mason told them not to criticize Hilfiger for speaking the truth. Audience members quietly agreed, murmuring about the need to teach kids the advantages of building a nest egg instead of spending now.

Mason believes even people of limited means can save and invest, thanks to company-sponsored retirement plans and mutual funds.

“I’m trying to get people to understand the hidden costs of doing nothing,” Mason said. “The overriding thing to do is to start early and it becomes consistent.”

A young person who sets aside $2,000 yearly for 10 years should be able to accumulate $1 million by age 65, he said. “It’s boring. It’s mundane. But it works.”

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At Providence Baptist, the message is catching on. Sheila Howard of Cleveland’s Shaker Heights area said Mason’s lessons led her to review her retirement program at work so she can contribute more and invest it better.

She’s more careful, even with small expenditures.

“I’ve paid attention to every time I run to the vending machine or I buy lunch every day instead of bringing it, and all of that contributes to my misuse of funds,” she said. “It may only add up to a couple of dollars, but it’s money. That’s gas for a week.”

The program has inspired Lenora Cole, an administrative assistant at Faith Community United Credit Union.

“I thought I was just going to work until Jesus came back,”she said. It was looking really bleak, but now I see there’s hope.”

IR END HILL