In 1996, Derek Drewery was a young man stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio when he ran into money problems.
“I can’t remember exactly what I needed a loan for,” Drewery says, “but I needed to borrow a few hundred dollars or so.” He turned to one of the short-term, high-interest lending businesses near the base for a “payday loan,” in which people borrow money against their paychecks and are typically supposed to pay it back within two weeks.
“When I went to pay it back it was a lot more than I had borrowed, so I had to borrow again to pay that back, and had to borrow again to pay that back,” Drewery recalled. “I got into the real churning situation to borrow this week to pay for last week.”
To help pay off the loan, Drewery cut back on food. “Finally, my dad caught wind of what was going on and sent me some Kroger gift cards, so I ate,” he says. “But at one point, I was sharing my last box of Cheerios with my little Jack Russell dog. I couldn’t afford food or anything.”
Now, Drewery, who works as an electrician and is the pastor of a nondenominational evangelical church in Springfield, Ohio, has joined an unusually diverse coalition of Christians that unites conservative churches with liberal ones to oppose predatory lending. One of these umbrella campaigns, Faith for Just Lending, includes, among others, groups of black Baptists and Latino evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Salvation Army.