Abraham Kennard should have saved the sermon for Sundays. It was way too lame to sway a federal grand jury – a group that tends to be a tougher crowd than church congregants.

“It’s not a law against riding in a Cadillac if you don’t want to ride in a Volkswagen,” Kennard, a preacher, told a Rome, Ga., jury during his recent trial on theft charges. Apparently, Kennard managed to convince about 1,600 black churches to invest in Christian resorts that he was developing around the country – and they did so to the tune of nearly $9 million.

But as it turned out, Kennard lied. That money didn’t go toward building places for the faithful to luxuriate, but toward building a lavish lifestyle. According to news reports, he used the money to, among other things, rent private jets and limos, and to amass a fleet of luxury cars.

Good thing the jury got it that living large wasn’t Kennard’s crime. Stealing was. They convicted him on 132 criminal counts including theft, tax evasion, fraud and money laundering.

Maybe the pain of prison will force Kennard to think about how he wronged those churches. But what I really hope happens is that the congregants of the black churches Kennard bilked use the experience to do some soul-searching of their own.

They really need to.

The first question they should ask themselves is why would they invest millions in developing Christian resorts when those same millions could be invested in tackling some of the problems that beset so many black communities?  Why invest in building resorts, say, when in most communities affordable housing is scarce, and many black people are on waiting lists for public housing for several years? Wouldn’t investing in building affordable housing be a more caring, Christian use of their money? Or to build supplemental schools that help struggling black students?

The other question they should ask themselves is why, even with Kennard’s promise that the resorts would be profitable, and they would get their money back more than 100 times over, whether they fell for his scheme because they were excited solely by the prospect of making money rather than the prospect of using that money to improve the lives of struggling people.

I hope the answer isn’t the former.

Now, I’m sure that some people will think that I’m being unfair and harsh to some churches that simply made the mistake of trusting the wrong man. I also realize that perhaps a crook peddling affordable housing could have cheated them as well.

But I’m not criticizing their decisions to entrust their money with Kennard as much as I’m criticizing the profit mentality that seems to be driving many churches these days. And while I know that pastors need to live, and edifices have to be paid for, I can’t help but think that churches, more than any other institutions, have more of a duty to use their power and their money to first tend to the needs of the community than the comfort of the flock.

I admit that I have higher standards for churches because the civil rights movement spoiled me.  When Martin Luther King Jr., was alive and the SCLC was in full swing, the black church was there tackling the evils of discrimination and poverty. Before King died, he was working on organizing a Poor People’s March. Nowadays though, the gospel of prosperity rules, and it seems as if many black churches have grown so comfortable in assuming middle-class values and materialism that they have forgotten that many of their own people are still grappling with the same problems that existed when King was alive.

King and his compatriots, for example, believed in using Christianity to confront the obstacles that hindered black people from getting access to basic opportunities in life – and to thereby make life fairer for them. But now, you have preachers like Kennard who have trivialized fairness to mean whether one should be relegated to ride in a Volkswagen versus a Cadillac.

Somehow, I believe he’s missing the point.

Kennard was greedy. His greed led him to dangle an artificial apple of a promise in front of a bunch of gullible church people.

But they should ask themselves whether it was their own greed that made them bite.