The Ball is In Our Court

By Will Acuff

A trillion dollars just got cut from federal poverty alleviation programs. And a lot of my conservative Christian brothers and sisters said exactly what I'd hoped they'd say: Government, get out of poverty. We want to do it locally.

I love the heartbeat of that. Anyone who's ever been to the DMV didn't come away thinking, Wow, what a loving experience. I get the impulse.

But then I started calling pastors. What's your plan now that the ball is in your court? And almost universally, the answer was some version of: Ah, we don't really have a plan. Maybe more jackets this winter. More turkeys at Thanksgiving.

If that's the church's response, we're going to miss this moment. Because the pain of our neighbors has not gone away.

I didn't grow up planning to think about any of this. I'm a pastor's kid — my dad planted a church in the office of a gas station outside Boston in 1985. I grew up with this sense that what God was doing was on the move, that the gospel was lived-out adventure. But after college, while I was working as a research analyst at Duke by day, I was playing in a rock and roll band by night. We opened for Better Than Ezra. Played the Apollo in Harlem. Hair down to here, none of it gray.

Then an epidemiologist friend took a small group of us to Nairobi. I stayed with a Kenyan family on the edge of one of the worst slums in sub-Saharan Africa, and my worldview just got destroyed. I didn't even know I had a worldview until then. It was something like, If you just try hard, it'll all work out. I came home disoriented in my soul.

I ignored it. The band was too good at hitting my ego. I joke that I did what a teenager does when they hear a thumping noise in their car — they turn up the radio and assume that fixes it. It didn't. God gave me the loving whisper first. When I didn't listen, He sent the loving sledgehammer. On our honeymoon, my wife Tiffany and I had a health crisis that ended in the emergency room, and everything we thought we were going to build our life around got bulldozed.

What we kept hearing from God was simple: I've made you to set your gaze on the margins. Walk in that direction.

So we did. We moved into a low-income neighborhood in East Nashville, off Dickerson Road — this was 20 years ago, way before the coffee shops. Tiffany got a job at the men's prison as a job training specialist. We had an open front door. And what we saw, over and over again, was that our neighbors were image-bearers full of God-given creativity and drive. There just wasn't a bridge of opportunity for them to express it in the marketplace in a way that would launch them out of poverty.

So we started building one. In 2011, that became Corner to Corner.

Our core work is helping underestimated neighbors plan, start, and grow their own small business — so they can become the economic engines of their families and, eventually, their wider community. We've graduated about 1,800 entrepreneurs. In 2025 alone, they put $46.7 million back into their own neighborhood economies through the revenue they generated.

Here's why that matters. When you look at how poverty alleviation usually gets done — even by the church — most of it is what I'd call relief. Coats. Meals. Christmas boxes. And relief is good. In a crisis, when someone's cortisol is flooded, you don't hand them a 25-step plan. You hand them a jacket and a bus pass, and you keep showing up. Relief builds trust.

But relief alone doesn't move people from crisis to thriving. It moves them to the bare stability line. And we live in a moment where 59% of Americans can't put their hands on $1,000 of emergency cash. One bad doctor's bill plus one flat tire in the same week, and you're back in the poverty cycle.

What changes the cycle is development — education, mentorship, and access to capital. When people try to start a business cold, about 23% of them are still in business after five years. When they're inside a supportive ecosystem, that number jumps to around 73%. At Corner to Corner, we're trending at 81%.

But the numbers aren't really the point. The people are.

Adrienne Bowling started A1 Mobile Notary out of her car because she realized you can never find a notary when you need one. She got to $35,000 and stalled out. She came through our 10-week program and did over $85,000 the next year. Today, she's over $200,000. When I asked her what it meant for her family, she told me: We're in a new neighborhood. My kids are in a new school. I'm getting my son his passport. Poverty told me my life had to be small. What I'm learning is that I can build this bigger thing.

That's what the church is positioned to do. Not just patch the gap. Build the bridge.

And here's the part I most want my fellow pastors and church leaders to hear: you already have what you need.

Your average church in America has business leaders sitting in the pews who are often the biggest donors in the building. And then the pastor has them doing parking lot duty. These are some of the most equipped people in the room, and they're the least deployed. I hear it constantly from high-capacity leaders: If you can make me useful in this, I will keep showing up.

That's why we built Kingdom Founders. It's the program we created so any church in America can do this in its own community. It's faith-integrated all the way through — love-of-neighbor language as you identify your customer, image-bearer theology, guided devotionals on the fieldwork weeks. It's running right now in places like Charlottesville (inside The Point's Pathways Out of Poverty work), Watermark in Dallas (with Carson Smith's team), and even with Syrian refugees in Amman, Jordan.

If your church runs two cohorts a year, you'll graduate 40 entrepreneurs and create around $1 million of economic impact in the lowest-income neighborhoods near you. You'll disciple business leaders who've been underused for years. And you'll open what I call a new front door to the church — one that's further out in the community than your parking lot.

You don't need to be in a big city. You don't need to know anything about business. I didn't, when we started. And I promise you — on your elder board, there's a business person. Guaranteed.

We live in a binary moment. People want to make this an either-or: the government does it, or it doesn't get done. I think it's an and. Pursue good government programs. And while that's happening — because the government doesn't exactly move fast — church, let's do this. If Christians are meant to be the best at love, practically, spiritually, holistically, then we should be on the forefront of this work.

We can get our orthodoxy and our orthopraxy right, but if we miss what I'd call our orthocardia — the right heart in action — we're going to miss it. Gospel words and gospel deeds have to go together.

The ball is in our court. The question is whether we're going to take the shot.

Will Acuff is the co-founder of Corner to Corner in Nashville and the architect of Kingdom Founders, a program that equips churches to help their neighbors start and grow small businesses. His first book, No Elevator to Everest, releases this year.