Rebuilding God’s Storehouse

Many of our best thinkers on poverty alleviation—Marvin Olasky, Bob Lupton, Brian Fikkert, John Perkins, Bob Woodson—have described a form of charity that makes a strong distinction between emergency situations and chronic ones. They’ve used many terms for how to handle chronic poverty, but let’s call it neighborhood stabilization. It’s grounded in the hyper-local community, it’s holistic, it’s defined by a long-term commitment of love, and it commits to exchange rather than handouts, dignity and self-sufficiency rather than dependence. The idea is to create an environment of stability on an entire block that then radiates out to the blocks around it.

Most readers who know a thing or two about human nature find the prospect of neighborhood stabilization sensible and hopeful, but frustratingly abstract. What does it look like in actual practice? And how can we rework what we’re doing now to take advantage of its insights? In No Quittin’ Sense, Rev. C.C. “Charley” White tells the riveting story of his hardscrabble turn-of-the-20th-century childhood and God’s call on him to transform his life of successful entrepreneurial endeavors into full-time ministry and service to the poor. An oral history in book form, No Quittin’ Sense ought to be a classic. It paints a vivid, concrete picture of a community transformed by the God-given vision of one man. But it’s also a picture of a moment in our history, a time when some things, like poverty and racism, were much, much worse; but other things, like family and community, were in far better shape among the poor. Much has changed, and it’s up to us to grapple with how to combine the freedom and prosperity most of us enjoy today with a few of those “old-fashioned” ideas about marriage, church, and work ethic that would mean much better outcomes for the least among us.

Meet Rev. C.C. “Charley” White

Two memories form the foundation of Charley White’s childhood: a baptism and a beating. Abandoned by her philandering husband, his mother was busy rearing four children and was far too exhausted to get them all to church on Sundays. But she took them to a baptism at the river that Charley never forgot. He went home to preach to his stick men and baptize them in his little pail. Not much later, however, an angry drunk named Albert Jones got into a fight with another man in Charley’s yard, and when Charley got in Jones’ way, he lost his two front teeth to the man’s senseless rage. So Charley grew up with a divided heart: leading his fellow children in imitation church services on Sunday afternoons while dreaming of the day he could learn to shoot a gun and finally make quick work of that scoundrel Albert Jones.

It’s a poignant picture of human nature: one part inexorably drawn to the transcendent, another entirely carnal. These two mental tracks ran parallel in an environment of almost unbelievable poverty. Charley mentions breezily that he wore nothing but a long shirt till he was seven, when his mother made him some pants to go to school. All the children wrapped burlap around their socks for shoes. There were plenty of missed meals, and three years of school was all he was afforded till he had to go out into the fields for the sake of the family, a great loss to a curious and gregarious boy. Such was life for a poor, fatherless black family in East Texas in the 1890s. 

Character and Action

Rev. White’s no-nonsense storytelling style leaves plenty of room for the reader to bring her own ruminations to his experiences. While White describes his childhood poverty in detail, he leaves little to no commentary on it. There’s something similar going on in one of my family’s favorite books, Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. It may seem odd and out of place that Corrie spends several opening chapters simply describing her growing up years and her household: family devotions, her father’s theological debates with his Jewish friends, her mother’s generosity to the neighbors in need, her brother’s ministry to the mentally disabled. After all, isn’t this a book about the exciting and terrifying task of running the Haarlem underground during World War II? Or a book about surviving the camps? Well, yes. But remember what we ask ourselves whenever the subject of the Holocaust comes up. Why did so few resist? Why did so few help? How could these sophisticated “Christian” people participate in such a horrific system? It’s Corrie’s opening chapters that answer the question. The ten Booms helped their neighbors during the war because they’d always been helping their neighbors before the war. The ten Booms understood the evil of Hitler because they had soaked their own lives in the love and wisdom of God and immediately, even instinctively, recognized the satanic rage in the Führer’s voice over the radio. Their active love and care for the mentally disabled—Corrie’s brother ran church services for them—made it impossible for them even to contemplate the eugenicist philosophy of the Nazis. When the war came to Holland, they didn’t debate what to do—they just began, without hesitation. Corrie makes none of these connections explicitly, but they’re crystal clear. One’s life flows from the character one has cultivated.

Rev. White is about the same business, but his story is much different. In spite of being desperately poor, Mama was insulted when others acknowledged the fact. She bent over backward to get her children slates and chalk for school, and stayed up nights to sew them clothes so they’d be presentable. When Charley describes the “light and airy” feeling he got when things weren’t “quite real,” one understands what it is to be so incredibly grateful to be receiving one’s first pair of pants. Why did Charley grow up to be the hardworking entrepreneur, pastor, and community builder that he became? It wasn’t all his mother’s hard work; Charley’s own sense of passion and drive contributed, too. But his mother’s example, and the sheer necessity of his situation, infused into Charley’s mind and body the deep habit of hard work. His reliability and trustworthiness in business would serve him well as he became a successful farmer, and the administrative abilities he developed translated in unexpected ways when he experienced the undeniable calling to open God’s Storehouse.

One of the most striking things about Charley’s life is his early attraction to preaching. After the baptism he witnessed, he began baptizing his metal dolls and stick figures. As he got older he began convening the children after Sunday school, and they would go to “Charley’s Church.” He would preach the sermon from that morning back to the other children, who would “yes” and “amen” him just as they observed in “big folks’ church.” God destined Charley to be a preacher from such a young age, it makes one think of Samuel or John the Baptist. But there was one great obstacle to be overcome before his destiny could be realized: his resentment against old Albert Jones. 

Charley’s story of facing up to his desire for revenge on Mr. Jones could serve as a template for the Christian struggle with sin. It’s also a picture of certain struggles those in destabilized communities are more likely to face, even though sin has tainted all human relationships with betrayal and heartbreak. High levels of addiction and shaky family formation increase the likelihood that children grow up with genuine trauma and wounds they will have to overcome as adults. Charley was working hard to learn to read but had to quit school at the age of 10 to work and help support the family, a bitter disappointment to him. His best friend, Isabela, died from meningitis as a child, making him hate God for failing to answer his prayers. His experience as a teenager of finally meeting his father and discovering a cruel, alcoholic bigamist exemplifies these kinds of losses as well. It couldn’t have helped the feelings of loss and anger to discover that his father had been living quite comfortably with his new wives and children while his first four children often went without food or proper clothes. 

In neighborhood stabilization work, one often hears practitioners discuss the spiritual lessons they’ve learned from those they’ve been working to empower. Many of these neighbors have raised other people’s children, forgiven terrible crimes against themselves and their families, and had little more than prayer to rely on in desperate, even violent circumstances. There’s a rubber-meets-the-road immediacy to the spirituality one must cultivate in a destabilized community. As easy as it is to hate and condemn criminals from afar, wise neighborhood leaders know full well that one fork in their spiritual road and that they might have been that same angry, lost person. Some of them once were. 

Charley’s Mean Years

After the childhood loss of Isabela, Charley was “no longer on good terms with God.” When the kids were old enough, Mama sent them to church while she stayed home to rest. Charley began to skip services and spend time in the woods, killing insects and snakes to release his anger and bitterness at his old enemy, Albert Jones. As he grew, Charley’s desire to own a gun would have struck no one as particularly unusual for the time and place, but he had one very particular reason in his own case: to kill Albert Jones. 

Once an almost preternaturally generous and sweet child, Charley’s increasing obsession led to self-hatred and meanness. As he grew into a man with a gun of his own, he even went to Albert Jones’ old house looking for him and scared the new owners. He started to go out partying and drinking on the weekends. He recounts: “I didn’t like the way I was living either. But didn’t seem like I knowed anything to do about it. I was mean and hard to get along with. … I was in a bad humor most of the time.” He goes on to describe the day at his boarding house that he kicked every man’s plate of eggs off the table one by one because they weren’t cooked right. He calls these his “mean years.”

But Charley got back on good terms with the Lord. First, he married a nice girl, Lucille. (In one particularly disturbing episode, he describes how seeing the physical consequences of promiscuity among the boarding house men kept him away from that vice, at least.) After their daughter was born, he took a walk in the woods. He began to think of how excited Mama would have been—she’d passed away by then—and how lovely and gentle his wife was with their newborn. Suddenly, a shaft of morning sunlight came through the trees. He was struck with the idea that God was trying to tell him something, perhaps that something bad was going to happen to his child. For the first time in many years, he began to pray. He prayed that his child would be safe, but his sense of discomfort remained. Then he remembered Albert Jones. He told God that he forgave Albert Jones and wouldn’t try to kill him. He expressed gratitude to God that he had never been able to find him in the years when he had been ready to do him harm. In his description of the walk home, one gets the impression that his soul had opened up to beauty again. He describes the birdsong, the dew on the leaves. He felt as happy as nature seemed to feel that morning, because he “wasn’t mad at nobody” anymore. 

Charley as Entrepreneur

Charley never mentions particular plans to enter into business. He simply expresses a certain discomfort with how Mama had to live. He felt that it wasn’t right somehow, and that he must do better for his family. When the opportunity to rent a small farm arose, he found a way to do it. For three years, all he could afford to plow with was a tiny mule and a horse with one lame foot! If there was no farm work that day, he earned a dollar here and a dollar there from side work. Lucille traded housework for a rooster and chickens so they could have eggs and more chicks. As soon as they were settled on their new farm, Charley got a license to preach from the Baptists and started a church.

As Charley’s reputation for hard work and virtuous living began to spread, he was able to get credit for groceries till his crop came in. When a neighboring farm became available, the owner offered to sell it to Charley. The $350 commitment was a risk, but Lucille was fearless. Charley notes how their incentives shifted after they became actual owners: “We never minded work. But looked like when we got some land that belonged to us, it just set us on fire.” He describes how they built up their farm, carried on various side businesses, rented another farm and built it up, and traded up their sad little team for two strong horses. 

But none of this seemed incompatible to them with a life of generosity. When they were first married, he’d always have Lucille cook extra for dinner so that the neighbor children, whose father was often ill, could have some. As a successful farmer, he lobbied the county to start an elementary school and offered his church building for the classrooms. When his brother took up with another woman for a year and a half, he moved his sister-in-law and her five children into his house. By this time, he and Lucille had five children themselves. 

One day he took a risk. He bought a calf with a $5 check he knew he didn’t have enough money to cover. The calf was too good a deal to pass up. So he took that calf and went straight to the bank to admit what he’d done to the bank president and ask him to let the check go through, as he could double his money right away by butchering it for meat. The bank president was so impressed with his business acumen that he offered him credit for any other great deals he might come across. He was thrilled, and within three months he had $300 in the bank. He then describes one of greatest strokes of “good luck” in his life, which came in the form of an excellent partner, Chuck Richards. They worked together for seven years, and even though Chuck was white, he never said “do this” or “do that” to Charley. He always said, “Let’s do that” together, which meant a lot to Charley. 

God’s Storehouse

Come the 1920s, Charley, now Rev. White, converted from Baptist to Church of God in Christ, a group he referred to as the “sanctified” or “holiness” people. If one understands Pentecostals, it makes it a bit easier to grasp what happened when, at the height of his farming and business success, Charley simply stopped his car by some railroad tracks after being overcome by the overwhelming feeling that he should not cross the tracks. Something seemed to be saying the name of the little town he’d just passed through: “Jacksonville, Jacksonville, Jacksonville.” As he stood there looking puzzled, a man approached him to see if he needed anything, and when Charley frankly admitted what he was experiencing, the man asked him about his profession. After finding out that he was a holiness preacher, the man—himself a Baptist!—encouraged him to come and start a church, as five or six others had tried and failed. You see, Jacksonville was “a tough place” full of pool halls, domino parlors, and red-light houses. Anybody who wanted to preach holiness there was going to have an uphill battle. But Charley didn’t hesitate: he took the man’s advice about a place to rent and turned the car around. It’s a kind of obedience to God that may sound insane to some. But everything Charley had experienced up to that point had prepared him for the work he was going to do in Jacksonville. When his brother Frank expressed his dismay as to what this move would mean for his business prospects, Charley responded, “God’s called me to Jacksonville, and I’m gonna go. When God tells a man to jump, it’s the man’s job to jump. It’s God’s job to make the hole for him to jump through, it ain’t the man’s job to worry about that.”

Rev. White’s church meetings carried on every evening till there was no more room to fit the attendees. But he had to support his family somehow, and these people didn’t have the money to tithe—to give 10% (roughly) of their income to the church. After having been a successful, land-owning farmer, he got a job as a cook, a donut-maker, and worker at a slaughterhouse. There’s something special about a man who can take pride in his work no matter what it is. Charley had a vision, and he didn’t care what it took to achieve it. What’s more, the job at the slaughterhouse paid little but came with all the scrap meat he could carry. And so he carried that scrap meat back to the poor children of his town, who deemed him “the meat man.”

It shouldn’t be passed over that work in a destabilized neighborhood means some scary run-ins. His church had to put out drunks, men with revolvers, and abusive husbands. He was threatened personally with a gun, and the police told him to get out of town, too, because the houses of ill repute nearby were making complaints that his services were disturbing the peace. It’s frustrating to be treated so badly by those one has come to serve. 

But it also became clear over time that Rev. White’s church was doing nothing but good. The abusive husband turned into the church’s security guard. The owners of legitimate businesses went and complained to the police that they couldn’t go to meetings as often as they’d like to because of the crime, and the police began to patrol more diligently. 

Observing the ubiquitous poverty in the neighborhood, Rev. White began to plan for Christmas by speaking to the businesspeople in the area about donating presents. Then he sat the children down, preached to them the gospel, told them that God had told the businesspeople to buy these presents for them—and that Santa Claus was a lie. He goes on in the book to say that “every year I had a Christmas Tree for the children, and I told them about Jesus’ birthday, and about the Santa Claus lie.”

White also appreciated President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) because it was important to give men work. “That was better than a hand-out,” he writes. Then again, Rev. White’s tradition of butchering meat to give out from God’s Storehouse started with a bit of rebellion against Roosevelt. He heard something he considered “plumb crazy,” that government men were killing cows and taking the hides but throwing away the meat. He couldn’t believe this, so he went to check it out for himself. Sure enough, the men explained to him that in order to keep prices high, they needed to throw away these cows. Rev. White explained to them that he was breaking his back to help starving people in Jacksonville. “Ain’t you got no heart a-tall?” he cried. The men made a deal: if Charley would butcher some of the cows for his storehouse, and if he brought them the hides, they wouldn’t say anything. He admits that “I never did understand exactly what was going on, but I knowed that we needed that meat, so I didn’t try to pry into nothing.” 

As the role of the state increased in its attempts to address poverty, Rev. White became increasingly worried. His new wife, Marthy (by this time, Lucille had passed away), was being reported by the doctors of the area for practicing midwifery. So Rev. White went straight to the judge and asked him what to do, since both he and his wife were sure that their reading abilities weren’t developed enough for her to pass an examination. The judge gave them permission to continue working as long as they turned in the birth certificates properly. So every time there was a bureaucratic obstacle, the Whites’ excellent reputation created an exception. 

As Rev. White’s work in the Jacksonville community grew, he built a dedicated church building (his congregation had been meeting in his front room). He created a ministry alliance with both white and black preachers, quite a feat in those days. He teamed up with the police to keep crime under control and help with juvenile delinquents. Because the police trusted him, he was able to contend with them for better treatment of black citizens. He started a blood bank at the hospital. 

Everything he did in Jacksonville prepared the town to weather the hardest days of the civil rights movement incredibly well. The City Council agreed to all their requests for improvements in the black part of town, and even agreed to train up black police officers. Without even intending to, Rev. White’s ministry alliance, his work with the police, and his relationships with all the business owners had created a sense of unity in Jacksonville. He then encouraged everyone in the Christian Citizens’ Association—a charitable organization that met in his church—that if the City Council was going to be this reasonable, then the black population could be reasonable right back. 

We Must Recapture What Has Been Lost

Reading about Rev. White’s life can be both inspiring and frustrating. On the one hand, God seemed to be with him in a special way that led him to do amazing things. These things made a huge difference in his community, where his grandson runs a barbecue restaurant to this very day. His book is a hidden gem of Americana, spiritual autobiography, and poverty alleviation insights (and winner of the Carr P. Collins Award for Best Nonfiction Book from the Texas Institute of Letters). But as poor as little Charley was growing up, he had gifts that many of our more affluent children do not. His maternal Indian grandmother taught his mom butchery and medicine, technical skills he then learned at a young age. In spite of his own broken home, most families in Charley’s day were intact, and he expected from a young age to marry before having children. The strong habit of churchgoing and other forms of community association meant that people were connected and eager to help one another and the needy. Many of these expectations and traits have been lost in the destabilized neighborhoods of today. This cultural poverty—not mere material need—defines what it is to be poor today. 

Moreover, Charley’s motivation to take care of his wife and children drove both his determination to become a success and his reconciliation to God. This brings up an uncomfortable but unavoidable question in 2024: What will the motivation be for young men today who are no longer expected to marry or provide for offspring? We have decent data showing that marriage and family themselves don’t just correlate with but actually cause increased income, better health outcomes, and higher reports of personal happiness. And some of the worst social outcomes correlate highly with fatherlessness. With the tradition of marriage almost completely lost in some neighborhoods, it simply isn’t occurring to our young men or young women that they should make that commitment prior to having children. 

Rev. White’s spirit of service, his calm dedication, his no-nonsense attitude, and his trust in God already exist among many of our neighbors in struggling areas. We must support and empower these anchors of the neighborhood but also return to our heritage and reclaim our traditions. The church, the family, and pride in one’s vocation were ubiquitous among poor Americans in very recent memory. We must fight the uphill battle against the perverse incentives of both the welfare state and toxic forms of charity. 

Such efforts are popping up everywhere. The Georgia Center for Opportunity has created a website that calculates the benefits cliff—that point when the employed make too much money to remain eligible for public help—so that employers can offer alternative benefits and keep people working. True Charity offers trainings for nonprofits to help clients move from welfare to work, transform food pantries into food co-ops, and Christmas shoebox giveaways into a Christmas Discount Store. The Woodson Center helps those in Section 8 housing to take over the direction of the complex to create cooperative services within it. 

But too many of us have been lulled to sleep by our public policy and charitable habits. Meanwhile, violence, illiteracy, drug addiction, and tragically unnecessary death plague our poorest towns. How much longer will we constrain our work within the strictures of the system—not just the state system but the philanthropic industrial complex as well? It’s time to stop the car in front of the train tracks and not move another inch. It’s time to get out of the car and ask God what he’s calling us to do. If He says jump, it’s our job to jump.