Flake wanted to change that mindset, and he did.

Today, The Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral is a 23,000-member congregation at the center of a profoundly different neighborhood from that which Flake encountered in 1976. Under his leadership, the church has added a 500-student private school, more than 600 units of housing for senior citizens, a day care center, a charter bus operation, a health clinic, a women’s resource center, an on-site credit union, a 54-unit apartment building with retail storefronts, and more than 600 brand-new single-family homes.

The end result is a community that has been transformed and stabilized by visionary economic development, driven not by corporations or Wall Street but by a congregation of inspired believers.

“We are, by definition, a renaissance church,” Flake says of Greater Allen. “We’re showing the rest of the nation that it is possible to turn a community around. Now, [businesses] that traditionally were absent from this community — supermarkets, drug stores, banks — are here. Before, we couldn’t get banks to even come into the neighborhood. Today, they’re competing for space in our buildings.”

Flake attributes the explosive growth to a simple idea: home ownership. Early in his ministry, he began preaching the virtues of home ownership to the members of his church. “God’s not making any more land,” he says. “Our communities will be lost if we don’t take responsibility for them.” He told his church that one of the best ways to take responsibility for a neighborhood was to invest in it, even if that meant investing in a depreciating asset.

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