Worldly things: Sharon Decker, who left corporate life to be a minister, shepherds the Department of Commerce's conversion.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVEY STORY - Cover story

Patricia Queen stirs potato soup. At the church dinner tonight, tables will sag beneath fried chicken, casseroles, pies and other dishes. After the blessing, members will sit elbow-to-elbow, eating and discussing who's ailing and who has traded pickup trucks. Most had family in this part of rural Rutherford County when Union Mills Presbyterian Church was founded in 1905. "My husband, Torn, and I are probably the only ones in the congregation not kin to each other," she says, laughing.

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A few years ago, a new minister came to the church. She was a lay pastor, unordained but persuasive. Backlit by rays shining through a crucifixion scene in the stained-glass window behind the pulpit, she wove soulful personal anecdotes into her sermons. Once, she inspired Queen to ride a bicycle 32 miles in a charity fundraiser. "Believe me," Queen says, "I am not an athlete."

Trim and smartly dressed, Sharon Decker was a middle-age mother of four, but it wasn't hard to picture her when she had been Miss Ashbrook High School '75 or, three years later, Miss Gastonia. "My children are horrified at the thought of me parading in a swimsuit," she joked to the congregation. She had been a corporate star in Charlotte but, at 41, left for little Rutherfordton, just down the road from Union Mills, to be president of a women's apparel company and, later, of its parent. But throughout her career, something else kept calling, so the Baptist minister's daughter finally decided to follow her father's footsteps.

Late last year, she had nearly completed her master's in divinity with plans to be a university chaplain. Then, three days after Christmas, a car slowly rolled up the driveway to her house, with its panoramic view of Chimney Rock. Pat McCrory was at the wheel. They've known each other more than 30 years, since both were young executives at Duke Power Co. "She's dynamic, she's smart, she has extremely good business experience," he says. "And, last but not least, there are her values." When he sent word he had a job for her, she declined, so he had driven 70 miles from Charlotte to plead in person.

A week later, on the first Saturday in January. McCrory was sworn in as governor. Sharon Allred Decker took an oath, too. As his secretary of commerce, she would shepherd not a flock but a $400 billion-plus state economy, nurturing existing business while trying to gather more. That has been the traditional role. But McCrory had something else in mind: He planned to privatize economic development, how the state sells itself as the place to do business. He wanted to shift responsibility from her department to a nonprofit corporation that, unfettered from red tape, would be nimbler than a bureaucracy. "We have to be able move faster," Decker says, "primarily in terms of job recruiting."

"We are going to unleash North Carolina's economic potential with a bold new approach to recruit and retain business," the governor said April 8, announcing his "Partnership for Prosperity." He gave the department 45 days to develop a plan, budget and timeline. Though few details had emerged by mid-May, Commerce insiders say the public-private partnership will be patterned on the Indiana Economic Development Corp., which has drawn fire for negotiating taxpayer-funded deals out of the public view. That has been a bone of contention in many of the dozen or so states that have such an agency. "When you're using the public's money, you want to be deliberative," says Robert Orr, a Republican lawyer in Raleigh and former N.C. Supreme Court justice who is among the most-vocal critics of economic incentives to attract business. "Transparency certainly isn't going to be fostered by speeding up the process."

Until the old Employment Security Commission was folded into it in 2011, Commerce had seen few changes since it was created in 1972, though two notable ones came about in the 1990s. That's when it began using grants and tax breaks to lure business and divided the state into seven regions, each with a public-private partnership, to decentralize recruiting. After the department is overhauled, a board of directors, chaired by the governor with Decker as vice chairwoman, will govern the North Carolina Economic Development Corp. It will assume all the department's duties related to recruitment and retention, including small-business development, travel and tourism, entrepreneurship and foreign investment and trade.

Not only will this get things done faster, the administration says, but eventually it should be less expensive. "The new partnership will leverage existing state funds to get the private sector more involved in economic development," says a press release from the governor's office. "In the long run...