SEVERAL YEARS AGO, through a series of bad experiences, I developed for a short time a quirky, negative attitude toward banks.

At the time, I ministered and provided for my family through free-lance writing and itinerant speaking, and we endured a long period of financial pressure. Any unexpected expense was a blow, and over a period of a month or two, several of those blows came from the bank. With no margin in our checking account, we made a recording error, writing a large check and not entering it in the register. Before we knew it, four checks had bounced, and for each one the bank charged an nsf fee of twenty dollars—eighty dollars in all!

Other things happened that compounded the pressure I felt.

I deposited a check from someone that later came back unpaid, and the bank charged me an extra fee for that person's nsf check. In the local news at the time, a bank in Chicago incurred a public relations fiasco by announcing their intention to charge three dollars each time a customer used ...