Volume 30, No. 22                                                  
June 5, 2005

Bank On It

   If you’ve ever had a mortgage. car loan, or installment payment plan, you owe a debt to Amadeo Pietro Giannini.

   He became one of the most powerful men of the 20th Century, even though he was the son of poor Italian immigrants.  As one writer put it, he learned the value of a buck the hard way: at age seven, he saw his father killed in a fight over a single dollar.

   When he was fourteen, A.P. quit school to work in his stepfather’s produce company where hard work soon earned him a partnership.  His reputation for honesty built the business so dramatically that A.P. retired at 31 by selling half the firm to his employees.  But when the businessman got restless and went to work for a small savings and loan company in San Francisco, he was appalled by its unwillingness to lend money to the poor.  In those days, banks gave loans only to big businesses and the rich.  So A.P. started his own bank in a former saloon.  He even made one of the bartenders an assistant teller.

   This radical new bank was the first to offer home mortgages, car loans and installment credit.  Reaching out to the immigrant poor, A.P. even went door-to-door, explaining his services to those who knew nothing about banks.  When the 1906 earthquake devastated San Francisco, he set up shop in the rubble while other banks stayed closed.  From a “desk” made of a wooden plank held up by two beer barrels, A.P. extended loans that helped rebuild the ravaged city.  Many of those agreements were made on little more than a handshake.

   Since many of his customers had to travel long distances, A.P. took the unheard-of step of setting up a branch in another city, San Jose.  Then he began buying up other banks in California and other places, culminating in his 1928 purchase of The Bank of America, which soon became the first nationwide bank, and America’s biggest..

   Along with his other innovations, A.P. helped struggling businesses.  He backed actors Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pick-
ford in starting the United Artists movie studio, loaned Walt Disney $2 million when Snow White went over-budget, and financed many visionary projects, including the Golden Gate Bridge.  When A.P. died in 1949 at 79, he was worth only $500,000, instead of the millions he passed up by giving them to scholarships and research into medicine and food production.  “It’s no use deciding what’s going to happen,” he once said, “unless you have the courage of your convictions”

   That should make many of us wince.  Here we are, entrusted with telling people about “the endless treasures available to them in Christ” (Eph. 3:8), but our voices are stilled by a lack of vision or conviction.  Part of the problem may be that, in God’s kingdom, love is the currency of the realm and we can only share it the way we should when we feel a profound, personal connection with its power and value, seen in the way love cost Jesus his life, for our life.  When it comes to love, our hearts must hold it in before we can hand it out.

   A second problem is that, like early bankers with their money, we tend to give love only to people who don’t need it  — those who are loving, stable, and risk-free.  “If you love only those who love you, what good is that?” Jesus asks.  “You’re to be perfect, even as your Father is perfect.” (Matt. 6:46,48)  In Greek, perfect means “an end,” meaning that perfection is a goal toward which we must always strive.  It takes time and practise, but the perfect church is the one that reaches out to the poor in heart who live as best they can on next-to-no-hope.

   To do that, we may have to set up shop in the dirty, I-don’t-want-to-be-here debris of their lives.  People need the Good News most when their world is torn apart;  when it isn’t pretty, or pleasant, or predictable.  And if we want them to show a little faith in us, we’ll have to show a little faith in them, trusting that not everybody in a bad place will take advantage of us, and that — when we give the love of our Saviour and ourselves — they’ll repay that debt.

   Instead of waiting, we must go where the need is, explain Jesus and his blessings to those who nothing about them, and support the struggling with visionary, vigorous love. We might not have much to show for it personally if we use what we have to feed and heal people’s spirits, but God will honour that work.  You can take that to the bank.

By Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the Followers of Christ church family in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications.  To receive these free weekly articles via email, send a note to sgamble@bfree.on.ca