Bank of America debanked my ministry. It wasn’t alone.

I thought my debanking story was over in 2020.

That November, Bank of America told us it was canceling our account because we were “operating a business type we have chosen not to service.” We had banked with them since 2011. Nothing about our work had changed.

The nonprofit I founded, Timothy Two Project International, trains pastors and church leaders in some of the poorest places on earth, and the needs of the people we serve had only grown during the pandemic. So, I did what any ministry leader would do. I found a bank that would serve us, and I moved on.

Almost three years later, I read a Daily Mail story about another Christian ministry called Indigenous Advance. It serves widows and orphans in Uganda. Bank of America had closed its accounts, too, using nearly identical language. Later letters said the ministry “no longer aligns with the bank’s risk tolerance.” Its leaders asked for an explanation and were stonewalled for months. Then I learned that Lance Wallnau had his own account frozen and only got it back after answering a series of invasive questions.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t looking at a single bureaucratic mistake. I was looking at a pattern. And I didn’t know how big it was. I asked in print how many ministries had been treated this way, and whether banks were testing the waters to see if Western Christians would stand by quietly.

Those were questions I couldn’t answer. I could only guess.

Then, in January 2025, someone asked them out loud. During a virtual Q&A at the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Trump pivoted from a question by Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan to a pointed request: “I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives.”  Moynihan didn’t address the accusation in the moment. But the ground had shifted. A question that a few ministry leaders had been asking quietly was now being put to the bank’s own CEO, by name, in front of a global audience.

Most recently, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released an extensive report titled “Debanked: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans.” It was commissioned to implement President Trump’s 2025 executive order on fair banking. It describes how big banks have used vague “reputational risk” standards to cancel the accounts of faith-based nonprofits like Timothy Two and Indigenous Advance. It also acknowledges the “real-world harm to customers and prospective customers” that debanking causes.

In Indigenous Advance’s case, that harm meant Ugandan employees who often live meal-to-meal were kept waiting on delayed paychecks because of a bank’s abrupt decision.

So, here’s where we are in the story. In 2020, it happened quietly, and one ministry was left thinking it was the only one. In 2023, a larger pattern started to emerge. In early 2025, the President put the question to Bank of America’s CEO in front of the world, and that August, he signed the executive order. Now, in 2026, the federal government is documenting that pattern in a formal report. That’s real progress. But it isn’t the end of the story.

The report also notes that Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina have passed laws protecting their citizens from discriminatory debanking, and it says those laws have “likely acted as a catalyst for changes in many banks.” That’s encouraging, but it also tells me something. Most Americans still don’t have that protection. A ministry in Ohio or a church in Oregon is no safer today than it was in 2020.

The report also points to the influence of activist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC has been indicted on charges that include making false statements to a federally insured bank and money laundering. Whatever the courts decide, it’s worth asking who has been telling banks which of their customers are too risky to keep.

I used to wonder whether banks were testing the waters. I no longer have to guess about that. The question now is whether the rest of us will let them keep testing.

State legislators should follow the example of Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina. Congress should take decisive action. And those of us who’ve been on the receiving end of a form letter that said nothing should keep telling our stories.

Without them, no one would have been asking questions at all.