"Leaders have tried to make church cooler, the music less stodgy, the language more accessible. As Thornton put it to me, “They ask the question ‘Why don’t people go to church?’ Or ‘Why don’t people come to our church?’ But very few of them are asking ‘Why would someone come to church?’ Or thinking of how to offer an answer that actually matches what people want and need.”

Most people, Jubilee leaders believe, don’t actually want the best praise music, or a pastor who tells them who they can or can’t love, or a book that tells them how God wants them to be rich. They want a church that believes that the way things are, especially in terms of oppression — financial, racial, and otherwise — doesn’t have to be the way things will continue to be. That life can, and should, be dramatically different. And that the church should have a central role in making that happen."

One of the primary ways that Jubilee would be different, and attempt to remake the world, would be its focus on debt forgiveness. “Debt Liberation Grants” would be allocated once a month to a member of the church, while the Jubilee Fund would be directed toward lifting two to four people out of poverty in a given year. For the last three months, the fund has been directed toward a 37-year-old woman who cares for five children while working two jobs — and whose landlord has recently started eviction proceedings. A church member referred her to Jubilee, and the cooperative council, which controls the fund, committed to paying three months of her rent and bills, and $400 a month for groceries for three months afterward.

“We want to respect the fact that she doesn’t owe us anything,” Thornton told me. “Not showing up to church, not her story or her kids’ story. If anything, we owe her everything. We want to be respectful of her story and what we do with the Jubilee Fund in a way that’s not exploitative. Capitalism put her in a bind, and as a church we need to do what we can.”

Thornton also drew up plans for mutual aid teams, where groups of four or five would work to pay off each other’s debt, round-robin style. First, a group would allocate extra money to one person with a high-interest debt, and pay it off entirely. Then they would shift their focus to the next debt — the person whose debt was just paid off would still pay what they would’ve allocated to their own debt. The end goal: Everyone’s debt is paid off in less time, meaning less time paying accumulated interest.

But the church had prided itself on being a “neighborhood church” — and no one from the low-income housing right around the church was actually going.

When they did start coming, Georgas and Thornton saw what happened when “very good liberals” were confronted with following through on their professed belief system. “That’s when the racist and classist stuff really starts to come out of these nominally progressive spaces,” Georgas said, especially over concerns around “liability” for when neighborhood kids hung out at the church — questions that somehow never came up when it was middle-class white kids hanging around.

Reed told the pastors that it was one thing, a few weeks in, if she was the only black face in church. But it would be a different thing if six months or a year in, that were still the case. She believes that Jubilee’s commitment to progress and a different world can’t and shouldn’t focus so intently on money and class. “We talk a lot in the church about the struggle against all things that hold us captive,” she said. “That includes debt. But how can we think about the powers of whiteness as holding us captive as well?”