When the Temple Falls: The Collapse of the Credit Union ‘Movement’

By Ed Speed

The credit union movement is collapsing under its own corruption.   I now believe that its destruction as a “movement” cannot be stopped.

The institutions built to protect its mission now protect only themselves. Those once entrusted to guard its cooperative soul have bartered it away for scale, status, and personal reward. Because the movement cannot admit the truth about its own unraveling, we must turn to an older story, one that has warned generations what happens when a community forgets why it was created. 

When The Temple Fell

In the year 70 A.D., the Roman General Titus, leading the Roman Fifth, Twelfth and Fifteenth legions, reduced Jerusalem to rubble. The great Temple, called the Herodian or Second Temple, was destroyed. The priests fled, the sacrifices ceased, and a stunned people asked the unthinkable: How do we remain faithful when our sacred center is gone?

The First Temple had stood as the unrivaled center of Jewish life for 600 years. Every major act of worship, sacrifice, purification, pilgrimage, depended exclusively upon its altar and priesthood. The priestly guardians of Temple ritual tied holiness to geographic presence and priestly precision. Faith was visible, centralized, and magnificent in its order and splendor.  It could not survive Rome.  

Small Local Communities

But from that great catastrophe came the greatest renewal in Jewish history. The loss of the Temple released a living faith from lifeless stone, giving birth to Rabbinic Judaism, a morally grounded tradition capable of surviving anywhere. Josephus recorded the destruction as tragedy. But it was also a birth. 

Led by the great Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, Jewish life was rebuilt around synagogues;  small, local communities where conscience and study could flourish. Judaism survived not because of its Temple, but because of its remnant.

The First Temple of Cooperation

Our credit union movement too, once had a First Temple era, a time when the cooperative ideal was simple, covenantal, and uncorrupted.

In our early movement, altars were kitchen tables and temples were union halls. Priests were volunteer bookkeepers and factory hands. Loans were granted by neighbors who knew one another’s names, stories, and struggles. There were no slogans, but there was a sacred scripture: “We help each other because no one else will.”

But prosperity brings forgetting. Success brings centralization. And our movement’s First Temple yielded to the Second we see in credit union life today.

The Second Temple Stands but Not For Long.

Our credit union movement today, let’s call it the Second Temple of Cooperation, still stands, still gleams, still performs its visible rituals. Conferences continue. Sponsorships multiply. Dashboards glow. The priesthood of consultants, regulators, and trade association professionals move confidently through its well-ordered courts.   Trade association dues and regulatory fees are today’s temple tax.

The hymns keep playing: “People Helping People.” “Stronger Together.” “Unity.” “Cooperation.” They echo through convention halls like liturgical refrains, recited long after the conviction behind them has faded. These now are our sacred scriptures, psalms and creeds, invoked as if repetition alone could restore meaning.

But beneath the slogans lies a terrible truth: The Spirit has departed our movement.

A Shift Away From Collapse

What was once a moral movement has hardened into a sterile system, sometimes magnificent in scale, meticulous in its rituals, but vulnerable in its soul. We traded kitchen-table covenant for marble courtyards. We mistook size for sanctity.  But it is fragile. 

As mergers sweep the land and small credit unions disappear like villages emptied in a distant war, we are called to ask: How do we remain faithful when the sacred center has forgotten its purpose?

There is no anger left, only lament. What once sheltered the ideal can no longer bear its weight. The modern credit union movement is as vulnerable as Jerusalem was under Rome.   

The Faithful Remnant

Just as Judaism did not end in 70 A.D., the cooperative ideal will not completely perish when the last great merger is signed, the last independent board is absorbed, or the last small credit union is declared “not sustainable.” Judaism survived through its founding covenant, and staying small, humble, morally alive.

I predict that the movement as we know it will die, soon. But the memory will not. The ideal will not.

Cooperation Will be Rebuilt by the Faithful

However, the future of cooperation, like the future of Judaism after the Second Temple, will not be rebuilt in the ruins of a now hollowed out movement. Cooperation will survive in the small, faithful credit unions who still sit across from their members rather than above them. In boards who still know their community rather than manage it. In lenders who still weigh trust, not algorithms. In staff who still treat service as covenant, not branding.

When today’s great Temple of Cooperation collapses under its own weight, when its priesthood disperses, when the rituals cease, when the smoke of merger consolidation finally settles, it will not be the end.

It will live on in scattered, humble communities where conscience still matters, and mutual aid still breathes. The cooperative ideal will endure; portable, resilient, freed from megastructures and institutional vanity.

But until we accept that our credit union “movement” today is on life support, the ideal cannot survive.  

Edward Speed is the retired CEO of a multi-billion-dollar credit union and holds a master’s degree in theology. These days, he spends his time serving food, washing dishes, and sweeping floors at a Catholic Worker House, helping homeless senior citizens. email: [email protected]