A FaithSignal News Feature | May 29, 2026
The juicer cost thirty-two dollars.
Kayla Hall-Ransom bought it at Walmart, paid in cash, and lugged it to a booth at the Nashville Farmers’ Market. She had a dream of turning her juicing hobby into something real. She had flavors with names like Cotton Candy Beet and Sunshine. She had a vision.
And she had thirty-two dollars’ worth of equipment standing between her and that vision.
A few weeks in, the machine started smoking.
It was, in her own words, “not it.”
So, she called her mentors at Corner to Corner — a Nashville nonprofit that trains historically underestimated entrepreneurs — and told them her juicer looked like it might melt through the table.
They loaned her $1,000. She paid it back in six weeks.
Three years later, Kayla Hall-Ransom stood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the opening bell.
“Who does that?” she said. “Nobody but God.”
🌱 The Ministry of the Small Beginning
Corner to Corner wasn’t built on big ideas. It was built on a simple but countercultural conviction: the people the world calls “underestimated” are not problems to solve. They are image-bearers waiting to be activated.
When Will Acuff and his wife Tiffany moved into a low-income Nashville neighborhood in 2011, they didn’t come to fix it. They came, as Will put it, “to get a theology of neighbor.”
What they found was a community rich in talent, passion, and vision — but starved of opportunity.
“We believe in image-bearer theology,” Acuff told Christianity Today. “But we practice it like a footnote. So often we see our neighbors just as objects of pity.”
Corner to Corner became their answer to that gap. Not another food bank. Not another relief program. Instead, a multimonth entrepreneurship academy that treats its students as future economic leaders — not charity cases.
And the results speak for themselves:
- Adrienne Bowling, a single mom of two relying on food assistance and Section 8 housing, launched A-1 Mobile Notary — an Uber-style notary service. Within a year, she generated $85,000 in revenue. She’s now approaching $200,000 annually. “I am breaking generational curses,” she said, “and God is breaking those through my business.”
- DeAngelo Johnson turned flashcards he made for his three kids into a peer-learning game called Flip N Figures. With help from mentors — including a patent attorney and a math professor from his church — his product is now being used across Charlottesville school districts.
- And then there’s Kayla Hall-Ransom — the woman with the $32 juicer. Today, she runs The City Juicery, a thriving business with seven Tennessee locations. Her operation includes a five-foot commercial juice press that can handle whole pineapples, and she recently hired an executive director to help expand her brand.
Every bottle of juice she sells is labeled with Psalm 34:8 — “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
“It’s not a sales pitch,” she says. “It’s a testimony.”
⛪ The Church as Economic Engine
Acuff and his team are now scaling their model nationally through a new initiative called Kingdom Founders — a ten-week entrepreneurship curriculum designed to run inside local churches.
The brilliance of the program isn’t just the curriculum itself. It’s the way it activates people the church often overlooks.
“So often you’ve got CEOs and CFOs in your congregation,” Acuff explained, “and pastors are like, ‘I don’t know what to do with you. Can you do parking lot duty?’”
Kingdom Founders gives those high-capacity professionals a new role: mentors and facilitators for aspiring entrepreneurs in their community.
The church becomes what Acuff believes it was always meant to be — not just a place of relief, but a place of restoration.
Last fall, The Point Church in Charlottesville, Virginia piloted the program. Of the 24 students in their most recent cohort, six had been incarcerated in the past year. Most were not members of the church.
But something unexpected happened.
“We’ve seen life change and salvation,” said executive director Chip Measells. “We get to have gospel conversations every week.”
Forty of The Point’s 69 graduates are now running businesses. Two-thirds of the volunteers had never served in the church before.
“It’s changed who we are as a church,” Measells said.
🔥 Faithful with the Thirty-Two Dollar Version
Here’s the part of Kayla Hall-Ransom’s story that refuses to let you off the hook.
She didn’t start with a vision board and a six-figure investment.
She started with a $32 juicer, a farmers’ market booth, and an idea that was one bad day away from literally going up in smoke.
She started with what she had.
And what she had — in that moment, on that table, with a juicer that was falling apart — was enough to be faithful with.
That’s the theology underneath the business model.
It’s the same theology Jesus taught when He fed thousands with a handful of loaves and fish, when He pointed to a mustard seed, when He honored a widow’s two small coins over the showy offerings of the wealthy.
God doesn’t wait for you to have the perfect resources before He starts working.
He starts with what you bring.
He starts with the smoking juicer. The avocado ice cream idea that sounds like a bad joke. The $1,000 loan that feels like a drop in the bucket.
Because the process of showing up, of working with what you have, of learning and trusting and trying again — that’s part of how He forms you.
For Hall-Ransom, the journey of building The City Juicery redefined her relationship with God.
“I grew up in church,” she said, “but I had a routine with God more than a relationship.”
The late nights, the foreclosures, her daughter sleeping on a cot in the corner of a shared kitchen while she worked — those weren’t just business challenges. They were spiritual formation.
“It’s reforming my relationship with God because it requires me to trust Him.”
📍 The Bottom Line
Corner to Corner and Kingdom Founders are not just nonprofit success stories. They are living proof that the church was never meant to be the last stop for people in crisis.
The church was meant to be a launching pad for people with a calling.
Acuff’s goal is 1,000 church partners. Each one training 40 entrepreneurs per year. Each one putting an average of $1 million back into its neighborhood economy annually.
That’s not just a social program.
That’s the kingdom of God — with a business license.
And it all started — as most kingdom things do — with something small, underpowered, and slightly on fire.
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.” — Luke 16:10
Taste and see.
Sources: Christianity Today — “In Jesus’ Name, Market Test That Avocado Ice Cream” | Corner to Corner | Kingdom Founders | The Point Church, Charlottesville, VA
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