[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 35 (Thursday, March 14, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E370-E371]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                HONORING THE REVEREND KIRBYJON CALDWELL

                                 ______


                            HON. KEN BENTSEN

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 14, 1996

  Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in honor of Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell 
of the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston, who has done 
so much to provide economic opportunity and improve the quality of life 
for so many people in Houston. I want to insert in the Record the 
following article from the February 20, 1996, issue of the Wall Street 
Journal that does an excellent job of describing Reverend Caldwell's 
contributions to our community:

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 20, 1996]

  Dual Ministry--A Houston Clergyman Pushes Civic Projects Along With 
                                Prayers

                           (By Rick Wartzman)

       Houston.--Time was when the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell was more 
     focused on profits than prophets, more on rates and 
     investments than rites and vestments.
       That was before he pulled a colleague, Gerald Smith, into a 
     conference room at the Houston investment bank where they 
     worked and, out of the blue, told him he was leaving business 
     for the ministry.
       Knowing that the Wharton School graduate and Wall Street 
     alumnus was on the cusp of making big money, Mr. Smith could 
     muster only one response: ``Are you crazy?'' He begged his 
     friend to slow down, at least to mull his decision overnight.
       But Mr. Caldwell's mind was made up, and he tendered his 
     resignation that afternoon. ``He was completely confident 
     that this was what he was supposed to do,'' recalls Mr. 
     Smith, who now runs his own $2 billion asset-management firm. 
     ``There was just no turning him back.''
       Some 17 years later, at age 42, Mr. Caldwell is one of 
     Houston's most prominent clergyman. An electrifying preacher, 
     he took over Windsor Village United Methodist Church in 1982, 
     when it was struggling with a mere 25 members, and he has 
     made it flourish, with more than 9,000.
       More broadly, Mr. Caldwell has emerged as a strong advocate 
     for civil rights in Houston's black community, the largest of 
     any city in the South. He also serves as a bridge to the 
     white establishment, landing on the boards of Texas Commerce 
     Bank, Hermann Hospital and the Greater Houston Partnership, a 
     button-down business-development group long dominated by 
     corporate executives.
       But his grandest achievement may be a project now nearing 
     completion: a multimillion-dollar business facility, located 
     in a once-abandoned Kmart, that is reviving a blighted area 
     of southwest Houston.


                              Many Facets

       Called the Power Center, the 104,000-square-foot complex 
     houses a Texas Commerce Bank branch; Houston Community 
     College, which offers computer training and business classes 
     there; a federal Women, Infants and Children (or WIC) 
     nutrition program, expected to soon serve more than 5,000 
     people a month; a health clinic; a pharmacy run by a first-
     time businessman; a 1,900-seat banquet facility; and a 
     private grade school founded by Mr. Caldwell. In addition, 18 
     of the 27 office suites have been leased to businesspeople, 
     including to Mr. Caldwell's wife, Suzette, an environmental 
     consultant.
       ``I think it's a tremendous experiment . . . to create a 
     situation where people help themselves,'' says Forrest 
     Hoglund, chairman of Enron Oil & Gas Co. and a financial 
     contributor to the Power Center.
       The project, launched four years ago, embodies what Mr. 
     Caldwell calls ``holistic salvation''--a bedrock belief that 
     God cares not only about the soul but also about people's 
     everyday social and financial well-being. The pastor sees a 
     connection between economic power and civil rights. ``Unless 
     there is economic justice, you won't have peace in the 
     community,'' he says. ``The Old Testament speaks of that.''


                      Such Projects Proliferating

       The Power Center is hardly unique. Across the nation, ever 
     more black churches are making commercial investments 
     designed to help empower African-Americans economically.
       Last month, on Martin Luther King's birthday, five of the 
     country's largest black religious organizations announced 
     they were forming a for-profit enterprise, Revelation Corp. 
     of America, which plans to recruit millions of churchgoers 
     and others to buy products at a discount from designated 
     companies; in return, the companies would also funnel money 
     back to the consumers' churches and into a national home-
     mortgage fund. Nationwide, black clergymen are increasingly 
     taking on entrepreneurial roles, starting up ventures to 
     bring capital and jobs to their areas.
       What makes the Power Center special, though, is the way Mr. 
     Caldwell so easily mixes divinity and deal-making.
       ``His background in banking and finance has helped him a 
     lot,'' says the Rev. William Lawson, Houston's pre-eminent 
     African-American pastor, who is leading an effort to build a 
     shopping center in the impoverished Third Ward. ``He has set 
     a standard for most of the rest of us in terms of development 
     around the church.''
       Well before the Power Center, Mr. Caldwell started several 
     nonprofit ventures to, among other things, shelter abused 
     children and develop low-income housing. While providing 
     needed services, these nonprofits also give jobs to more than 
     125 people, placing them among the largest black-owned 
     employers of blacks in Houston.
       For a long time, Mr. Caldwell notes, black churches were 
     pillars of economic activity, serving during Reconstruction 
     as the community's savings institutions and insurance 
     companies. ``What we're doing,'' he says, ``is simply taking 
     a page from the 19th-century church.''
       And giving it a 20th-century twist. To get his holistic 
     message across, Mr. Caldwell delivers potent sermons filled 
     with the vernacular of modern life. A recent homily on the 
     need for better communication between the sexes drew as much 
     from the bestseller ``Men Are From Mars, Women Are From 
     Venus'' as it did from Scripture. As he spoke, he tossed a 
     basketball, football and softball to underscore key points.
       This rousing style--along with a myriad of community-
     outreach programs and several popular choirs backed by a 
     pulsating band--attracts many black urban professionals to 
     Windsor Village. But the church also draws older people and 
     the working class, making it one of Houston's most socially 
     diverse black congregations.
       As Windsor Village has expanded, so has Mr. Caldwell's 
     power base. In turn, he has used that to attack redlining, 
     fight to bring more minorities into the state judiciary and, 
     early on, battle unsuccessfully to promote a black or 
     Hispanic to the superintendent of Houston schools. In recent 
     days, Mr. Caldwell has helped lead a protest against what he 
     calls the unfair treatment of the family of Warren Moon, as 
     the professional football player stands trial on spousal-
     abuse charges.


                           useful background

       Yet his intellect and leadership skills--and his years at 
     Charleton College, in Northfield, Minn., where he majored in 
     economics; the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School; 
     and then First Boston Corp., where he sold municipal bonds--
     have made him an attractive addition to old-line Houston 
     institutions.
       ``We in the establishment bet on Kirbyjon,'' says Charles 
     Miller, a wealthy Houston businessman. He helped put Mr. 
     Caldwell on the boards of the Greater Houston Partnership and 
     Texas Commerce Bank after meeting him through the late Mickey 
     Leland, a Democratic congressman from Houston. Not many years 
     ago, Mr. Miller acknowledges, many white business leaders 
     worried that minorities let into the club might turn out to 
     be ``divisive or agitators or take advantage of the system.''
       But Mr. Caldwell has assuaged those fears while avoiding 
     the impression in the black community that he has sold out or 
     been co-opted. ``Although he moves with poise and ease . . . 
     in corporate boardrooms, he also moves with the independence 
     of knowing that his base of support comes from people who are 
     out of the economic mainstream,'' says Rodney Ellis, a 
     Democratic state senator and a former senior aide to Rep. 
     Leland. (Mr. Caldwell's first wife, from whom he was 
     divorced, worked as a Leland aide and was killed with him 
     when their plane crashed in Ethiopia in 1989.)
       The idea for the Power Center came to Mr. Caldwell in 1992, 
     when he was in Jonesboro, Ark., for a family reunion and 
     visited a Wal-Mart there. Several weeks earlier, he had been 
     approached by the owners of Houston's Fiesta supermarket 
     chain about what to do with the old Kmart on their property; 
     the building, just down the road from the Windsor Village 
     church, had long been vacant and was turning into a rat-
     infested eyesore.


                          the smorgasbord idea

       Walking through the Wal-Mart, Mr. Caldwell was struck by 
     its wide range of products. And he thought Windsor Village 
     should similarly offer ``a smorgasbord of services''--in its 
     case, medical, financial and educational--as ``a one-stop 
     shopping center for persons in the community.''
       But the church didn't have the money to lease the old 
     Kmart--what Fiesta had in mind. So, Mr. Caldwell started 
     negotiating. ``By the time we were through, the discussion 
     had switched from us leasing them the

[[Page E371]]

     property to us giving them the property,'' says Buster 
     Freedman, who manages Fiesta's real estate. He not only calls 
     Mr. Caldwell a ``visionary'' for persuading Fiesta to make 
     the $4.4 million donation, but a ``wheeler-dealer'' as well.
       Attracting tenants to the Power Center hasn't always been 
     easy. For example, Texas Commerce Bank, a unit of New York's 
     Chemical Banking Corp., determined that the neighborhood's 
     traffic pattern didn't make it ``the right place to put a 
     branch,'' Chairman Marc Shapiro says. But in the end, he 
     adds, he was persuaded by Mr. Caldwell's ability ``to attract 
     people and energy to that spot.''
       Most of the Power Center's occupants and customers are 
     black. But the area is diverse, and Mr. Caldwell is careful 
     to reach out, making sure that fliers promoting a recent 
     health fair, for instance, were in Spanish as well as 
     English. ``It would be insensitive, not to mention 
     economically dumb, to fail to recognize the multicultural 
     nature of Houston and market accordingly,'' he says.
       Like most CEOs, Mr. Caldwell likes to tout numbers. The 
     Power Center, he says, will generate some $26.7 million in 
     cash flow over the next three years--``and that's real 
     conservative''--plus more than 220 new jobs.
       Before anybody could move in, the site had to be renovated, 
     of course, at a cost of more than $4 million. Some of that 
     money came from donations, some from federal and private 
     grants. But most of it--$2.3 million--came from refinancing a 
     bond offering the church had made years earlier and from 
     issuing new debt.
       Mr. Caldwell delights in recounting how the church put the 
     deal together with American Investors Group Inc., a 
     Minneapolis securities firm specializing in working with 
     nonprofit groups. ``They offered us the lowest NIC,'' he 
     says, quickly explaining: ``That means net investment cost. 
     It's investment-banker talk.''
       He didn't always talk like that. A product of Kashmere 
     Gardens, a low-income neighborhood here, he grew up around 
     his father's clothing store, and he credits that 
     entrepreneurial environment with helping point him toward a 
     business career. But he says he also recognized that others 
     from the neighborhood--``pigeon droppers, hustlers, pimps and 
     prostitutes''--were entrepreneurs in their own way, and he 
     learned lessons from them, too. ``They lived what, materially 
     speaking, was a good life,'' Mr. Caldwell remembers. He vowed 
     to do the same, ``only legally and morally.''
       Throughout his life, Mr. Caldwell was active in the church. 
     And while on Wall Street, he even called his godfather, a 
     Sunday-school teacher back in Houston to ask, ``How do you 
     know when you've been called to be a minister?''
       ``You'll know when you stop asking and start telling,'' 
     came the reply.
       In October 1978, Mr. Caldwell did just that. He had 
     recently returned to Houston from New York and was working at 
     Hibbard, O'Conner & Weeks, a regional investment bank, when 
     he decided on his bold career change. He says he simply had 
     reached a point where ``my heart and my mind were in synch.''
       Now, at a Sunday service, more than 1,000 are packed into 
     Windsor Village. ``Welcome to Kingdom-building, Satan-busting 
     territory,'' Mr. Caldwell declares. For the next 90 minutes, 
     he is a whirlwind--kneeling down, springing up, raising his 
     arms heavenward, mopping his brow with a blue towel--as he 
     prays and sermonizes and laughs and sings. Behind him, a 
     giant sign reads, ``The Power Center, It's In Your Hands.''
       As the collection plate is passed, Mr. Caldwell invites to 
     the altar all those with ``financial celebrations and 
     concerns.'' He implores them to ``thank God for blessing your 
     contracts, your business plans, your marketing decisions.'' 
     As scores come forward, he shouts, ``Amen.''

                          ____________________