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Wednesday mornings at 8, 24 women crowd into Leticia's Eatery in Muntinlupa City, a poor Filipino community on the southeast edge of Metropolitan Manila. They sing "Lupang Hinirang" ("Chosen Land"), their national anthem, recite a pledge of commitment, pray, and sing Christian songs. After that, 52-year-old Letty, who owns the eatery along the narrow San Guillermo Street, leads a Bible study.

Finally, the women get down to business. They belong to Fellowship 3 of the Center for Community Transformation (CCT), a community development organization that focuses on fellowship members' spiritual as well as economic needs. Almost exclusively women, CCT business owners earn money selling fish and bananas, trading inexpensive products, operating mobile phone stations, and selling consumer goods door to door. All are facing new struggles to make ends meet: About 35 percent of the Philippines' 97 million people are destitute, living on $1.25 or less a day. The global financial crisis has only compounded their plight, as the national economy is down 30 percent.

Keys to the success of the center's many fellowships, which function like cell groups, are its microloan program and its instruction in Christian living, coupled with teachings on sound business practices. The average CCT loan is $300, enough for one woman to launch or grow a local business. During the business end of the meeting, women solve problems and encourage each other. Each woman harbors high hopes of making a small profit and paying off her loan on time. At the end of each weekly meeting, members sign the general ledger, and a local pastor closes with prayer.

In Fellowship 3, most of the participants come from a Roman Catholic background. A growing number of them have had a born-again experience, revitalizing their faith. But the group does not discriminate and is open to all. "They listen to the Word of God and are refreshed," Letty, a CCT client and fellowship leader, observes. "At first they came to join because of temporal needs. As the fellowship aged, their spirituality matured." The women's lives and families change, too.

With its motto of "serving God by serving the poor," CCT is highly effective in doing just that: Since 1992, it has partnered with 125,000 individuals in 6,000 fellowship groups. Though it works with international ministries such as Habitat for Humanity and Campus Crusade, CCT is an entirely Filipino venture, funded, staffed, and directed by nationals.

The microfinance movement made global headlines when Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Worldwide, more than 3,000 organizations now provide small-scale financial services such as loans, savings accounts, and life insurance to about 120 million people.

Ruth Callanta, the founder of CCT, is a pint-sized, motherly dynamo brimming with enthusiasm. Energetic evangelism blended with community development form the core of her ministry model. She knows all the economic buzzwords and can debate economic development methods with scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. But Callanta's own journey of transformation began not in a classroom debate on running a business but in a Nepalese church, where she found herself unable to stop crying in 1988.

Having grown up in a rural Methodist family, Callanta learned Christian values and had committed herself to Christian mission at a young age. Through high school and college, she had volunteered with community organizations that fought poverty. Increasingly, though, she sensed that the church was irrelevant to activism and was drawn into politics. Under the corrupt and repressive regime of Ferdinand Marcos, president of the Philippines from 1965-1986, Callanta was briefly imprisoned. Following the 1986 revolution, Callanta became a university administrator. Later she was hired as one of the top executives of the Philippine Business for Social Progress, a nonprofit that organizes corporations and agencies to work in concert against poverty.

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September 2009, Vol. 53, No. 9