[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.''

____________________