Churches need to wake up and lend more than just an ear

I am what you might call a Wasp: a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. My forebears were almost exclusively British, although several generations ago the family on my father's side forgot how we ever happened to come by a Spanish surname.

Many years ago an old relative told me about an Admiral Delmar in the Spanish Armada who, when Sir Francis Drake scuttled the invading dago fleet 500 or so years ago, washed up on the English coast and never went home.

There is another hoary bit of family lore about how the first English Delmar was a flunky in the court of Catherine of Aragon, who went off to London when she was summoned thither to become Henry VIII's first wife and, also, didn't bother going home.

Not for a moment do I believe any of this blarney. Why did the Spanish sailor have to be an admiral and not a mere deck hand? And the Catherine of Aragon story simply beggars belief. (It also overlooks the fact that Catherine was previously Henry VIII's sister-in-law, having been engaged to the previous heir, Prince Arthur, at the ripe old age of three and married to him when she was all of 16, at which point the Prince of Wales promptly died - as teenagers sometimes did in those days.)

What I do know with some reasonable certainty about the Delmars is that they were a warlike lot; fighting in the name of various of his or her Britannic majesties from at least the Crimean War. And it was thanks to the fact that the Delmars liked shooting people for a living so much that we washed up in South Africa, my great-grandfather, a sergeant, settling here after the Anglo-Boer War.

I was brought up a Presbyterian, but once tried to become an Anglican as I adjudged them Protestant enough and their church was, literally, just down the road. I like certain things about the Anglican service: the answering back between congregation and priest; the incense but, at the end of the day, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Calvinist. Nevertheless I retain a great interest in the dear old Church of England. (Apart from anything else I think Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is one of the most appealing churchmen since Martin Luther.)

So when I read about a financial-services entrepreneur being told by the Archbishop of Canterbury that his church was going to put the entrepreneur out of business by starting its own (less expensive) credit unions, I pricked up my ears. Especially when I thought: hang on, wasn't this business started by South Africans?

True enough; Errol Damelin, the CEO of Wonga, the small-loans business that charges extortionate interest rates (like 5800%) on little loans of up to a month and that is now renting lamp-post advertising space in this country, is a Sefrican. The poor man: imagine you have a British business and then discover overnight that your powerful new competitor is none other than the state church. Sorry for you, boet.

Wonga gives small loans to almost everyone for short periods of time - for which it charges ridiculous interest and fees. It's the grubbiest form of usury imaginable, but Damelin spotted a gap and went for it (along the way garnering a clutch of entrepreneur-of-the-year awards). Too bad that his business model is built on the desperation of poor, cash-strapped people; it's not something I would like to do for a living.

(It is, of course, thanks to Catherine of Aragon - and the facts that a) she stubbornly failed to have a boy baby and b) Henry VIII preferred his girlfriend to her - that there is an Anglican Church, Damelin's powerful new competitor, at all.)

It was only a matter of time before Wonga showed up in the country of its founder's birth, a country that has an unsecured lending sector that is not only growing like Topsy, but that shows every sign of getting out of control, causing not a little anxiety at places like the Reserve Bank.

Unlike the British, most South Africans go to church all the time. Where, you have to wonder, are our churches in business; in relieving the short-term financial stresses of their congregants? Aren't they missing a gap? If I was in the religion business, with a few million devoted adherents, I would be selling loans and life insurance left, right and centre. After all, it was only a few centuries ago that the Catholics were selling after-life insurance.