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Toward the end of an emotional service at Houston's Windsor Village United Methodist Church--where several choir members have fainted at the altar-- the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell offers an unusual closing benediction. He invites all those with problems at their jobs to join him in prayer for the ability to write better resumes, get out of dead-end jobs, avoid the pitfalls of office politics and make more money.

Mixing money with religion is nothing new. In the 1920s, Aimee Semple McPherson saved souls at a $1.5 million Los Angeles temple featuring a 30- piece orchestra; a decade later, Father Divine motored around New York in a $25,000 Duesenberg. More recently, Jim Bakker and others built huge ministries by convincing their flocks that riches would flow to those who relinquished their wallets to the Lord.

Like Bakker, Caldwell does his share of fund-raising. But unlike other financially minded evangelists of the modern age, Caldwell raises money to help foster the most basic component of prosperity: the creation of jobs.

As government tries to get the poor off welfare, congregations like Windsor Village are struggling to maintain the fraying social safety net. But when Caldwell asks his 10,000 members for money for the poor, he is not just asking for funds that will feed the hungry or house the homeless, though the church does have programs that address those needs (at a cost of about $500,000 annually). He is also raising capital for the Power Center, a 104,000-square-foot complex that houses a host of educational, medical, social and entrepreneurial services in a lower-middle-class section of southwest Houston.

Occupying a former Kmart department store, the Power Center is a curious blend of religious, secular, public and private interests. The property itself was donated by Houston's Fiesta Mart supermarket chain, but the real seed money came from the Windsor Village congregation, which put up $582,000 toward the $4.3 million renovation costs; in addition, the Power Center has raised $2.5 million through two bond offerings, $365,000 in donations from private foundations and $500,000 from a federal grant. The Power Center qualifies as a tax-exemptnonprofit corporation because of its mission to provide economic development in a low-income area.

The mix of services includes programs to address the emergency needs of the poor, such as a food bank, a federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program and an AIDS outreach program. There is also a community college branch that offers computer training and business classes. To provide affordable office space, the center has 27 office suites where tenants can share overhead costs such as clerical help. ("Praise the Lord and take a letter, Ms. Jones.")

All of the center's tenants--including a Texas Commerce Bank branch and University of Texas's Hermann Hospital--pay market rates, and the church uses those payments to retire the bonds. The result has been the creation of 500 construction jobs and 226 other jobs nearly two thirds of which came from low-income applicants. Caldwell estimates that the Power Center will pump $26.7 million into the neighborhood over the next three years.

Reading the market. Such an economic development project might be daunting for most churches, but Caldwell has the right background to pull it off. With an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, he worked as a Wall Street broker and an investment banker before becoming a minister more than a decade ago; Caldwell says he'd long wondered whether his true vocation was the ministry and one day heeded the call. He was directed to pastor Windsor Village, a tiny Houston church with only 25 members. Using an electrifying preaching style, Caldwell built his church like a growing business, attracting a mostly middle-class African-American congregation that he refers to as his "market."

As his church grew, Caldwell, 43, put into practice his long-held belief that the role of churches extends far beyond saving souls: "It is not a stretch to see God moving in the community economically ... or in the workplace."

The church's financial role is helped by economies of scale--namely, a huge congregation of 10,000 souls. In recent years, megachurches have been driving out smaller churches; nationwide, 80 percent of the churchgoing public now attends 20 percent of the churches. And as businesses look to be more competitive, nonprofit partners like the Windsor Village allow them to cut costs while providing services to areas that were once considered marginal markets. For example, when Caldwell approached Texas Commerce Bank about opening a branch in the Power Center, he convinced the bank that the branch would make financial sense because the capital for renovating the property would come from the church.

Windsor Village United Methodist Church and its dynamic pastor are not stopping with the Power Center. The church is appointing an "employment minister," who will work with the unemployed and offer classes in resume writing and job interviewing skills, as well as providing a database of jobs culled from Houston's largest corporations. Caldwell also wants to develop an industrial park with businesses such as printing and automotive repair shops.

But his most ambitious project is a program aimed at getting the homeless off the streets and into real employment. In 1992, the United Methodist Church hierarchy asked Caldwell if he would take over St. John's, a dilapidated old church in downtown Houston with only nine active members. Caldwell shocked many church leaders by appointing a married couple, Rudy and Juanita Rasmus, as co-pastors. Neither has any formal divinity training; he worked in commercial real estate, and she was a financial planner. The church now has 2,000 members and provides a program called Daybreak that allows the homeless to take showers, wash their clothes and get counseling.

St. John's is now trying to raise $2.4 million to build a complex that will house job training, literacy and GED instruction, computer training and medical facilities. The church may even start its own businesses, such as office cleaning and low-tech manufacturing, that will provide transitional jobs for Houston's 10,000 homeless people.

Caldwell likes to point out that 17 of the 29 parables told by Jesus in the Bible have to do with money. "For a church to intentionally turn its back on economic development and financial enlightenment," says Caldwell, "not only are they passing up an opportunity to make America a more vibrant and safer place to live, they also are denying one of the main threads that runs through the Bible."