Invested Faith will premiere a mini-documentary series to inspire closing churches to donate assets to help social entrepreneurs bring about change in the communities they serve.
The faith-based organization launched by Amy Butler announced the first video in the series focuses on Tiffany Terrell, founder of a nonprofit mobile grocery business that uses buses to deliver healthy, low-cost vegetables, meats and other commodities to food-desert communities in Southwest Georgia.
Inside the grocery bus
“We’ve partnered with Good Faith Media to make these min-docs of our fellows as a way of showing closing churches who their money is helping, instead of just telling them,” Butler said. “We are also spending the year filming a documentary about a church that is giving to this project.”
Terrell is one of 30 Invested Faith entrepreneurial fellows who have received $5,000 grants generated by donations from dying congregations, Butler said. While the fellows program began in 2020, the focus is now on cultivating congregations that already have accepted closure and want their legacies to continue through ministry and service.
And that is where the short documentaries about the fellows come in, she added. “Finally, here’s a hopeful way to talk about what God is doing in the world. God’s not there to fix our organist problem or get some new families through the doors. Stories like Tiffany’s will give churches about to close their doors something to believe in again.”
Terrell opens her nearly four-minute video by describing the dire needs in the Albany, Ga., region addressed by A Better Way Grocers — and which would be bolstered by the giving of dying congregations.
“Among our challenges, citizens face food insecurity. We have grocery stores that have closed. We have people who have mobility issues and many people who do not have transportation. It creates barriers,” she said. “Many of our citizens are faced with diet-related issues like high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol. We have people who live in food deserts and it’s just not right. My upbringing was centered around faith. We help our neighbors. We love our neighbors, and we get up, we go out and we help people.”
One customer said he could not eat healthily without Terrell’s business. “I buy the vegetables, I buy the fish from here, the chicken from here and I wait for every Thursday. That’s why you see me filling up here, because the food here is fresh and I look forward to seeing them every week.”
A woman added that A Better Way Grocers also provides food education to customers in areas deprived of healthy options. “Miss Tiffany, she talks to us about our nutritional needs and the things we can do to help ourselves. It’s really a benefit to have them coming into our community.”
Terrell added gratitude for Invested Faith, which helps not only financially but through the resources and experts available through the fellows program.
“It means we have a network of people helping us with the work we do. People who give to Invested Faith help people in Southwest Georgia by showing organizations like ours a better way to be able to further serve our community.”
Interviewed separately, Terrell added that her pressing needs include being able to hire staff and to switch from buses to easier-to-operate vans. “This is a real opportunity for others to make a difference to the more than 300 people we serve in this area.”
She also praised Invested Faith for including her work in its mini-documentary series. “They have a national platform that will help expand awareness about us and hopefully generate donations from other sources.”
Tiffany Terrell
The Invested Faith project benefits its donors as much as it does those helped by their giving, said Jason Coker, national director of Together for Hope, the rural development coalition of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which partners with Terrell and other social entrepreneurs.
“They are doing profound and amazing work with closing churches who have the opportunity here to live into that gospel passage about selling all possessions and giving to the poor,” he said. “They give Tiffany and other grassroots leaders a higher capacity to do the work they are doing.”
Coker said the video about Tiffany is expertly made. “When I saw it, it reminded me of the pitches I have seen people make to venture capitalists. It will widen her profile in the general public and drive revenue her way.”
Butler, who is currently pastor of a small United Church of Christ congregation in Hawaii, said two mini-documentaries will be released annually, with the next scheduled for October.
“We are only looking for churches that are closing, not those wanting to repurpose buildings into coffee bars or other purposes,” she said. “It can also be colleges and other religious institutions.”
The prospects are good given that thousands of U.S. churches are closing annually, she added. “The number of people we could potentially fund is unlimited as far as I can tell.”
Butler described her leadership of Invested Faith in the language of a calling. “I am unwilling to cede my faith to the story of failure. God is at work in the world. It’s just a matter of whether we are going to show up in the same place.”