c. 1999 Religion News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. _ While America’s religious congregations are often viewed as the spiritual nurturers of individuals in the pews, they also can have a public presence that nurtures society.

Religious scholars and congregational leaders gathered recently for a conference looking at the public role of congregations and discussed how houses of worship can move beyond their in-house concerns to making contributions to their communities.

The Rev. Martin Marty, director of the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago, said congregations, when viewed from the inside, are composed of people with a wide variety of mind-sets _ with politics ranging from liberal to conservative and spirituality ranging from charismatic to meditative.”What the gathering is is of a great number of apartnesses that find some occasion for unity and moments of community and transcendental moments even of communion,”said Marty, the keynote speaker at the conference sponsored by the Alban Institute Oct. 21-22.

But when congregations move beyond the things on which they differ to work together outside their sanctuaries, they can make a difference in their communities, he said.”When you really disperse together to that public world, you get a whole new perspective on things you were fighting about back there,”he said.

The conference brought more than 100 people from across the country together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Bethesda, Md.-based institute, which has assisted mostly mainline Protestant congregations through books, courses and consulting services.

In a panel discussion featuring experts from congregational, theological and public policy circles, the conference explored the extent to which congregations serve the larger society and the various ways they go about it. In a survey he conducted in 1998, University of Arizona sociologist Mark Chaves said he found while a majority of congregations do some sort of social-service work,”only a very small minority of congregations do social service activity in an intensive, major way.” For example, while about one-third of congregations offer food programs, only about 3 percent offer substance-abuse programs and about 1 percent offer job programs.

With the advent of the”charitable choice”provision in 1996 welfare legislation, the shape of the church’s public presence is beginning to change, some panelists said. Though still little-known by many congregations, the provision allows faith-based groups to use public funds to provide services such as job training, food and basic medical care.

Chaves found in his study that one-third of U.S. congregations surveyed said they would be interested in applying for government funds for social service activities but today only about 3 percent of houses of worship receive government assistance for such work.

Amy Sherman, director of urban ministries at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Va., said her studies have found there are about 2,500 church-based welfare-to-work mentoring programs across the country. She has worked as a consultant to churches interested in financial and non-financial partnerships with governments to help their communities.”We’re seeing churches getting into a particular type of ministry that has profound implications on the people they are serving,”she said, adding that former welfare recipients have told her they credit the emotional support of churches for smoother transitions.

E.J. Dionne Jr., a Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said the interest in increased governmental aid to religious institutions poses difficult questions concerning the separation of church and state.”There’s a lot of evidence … that the most successful faith-based programs are the programs that are most deeply immersed in religion, the ones that make … the greatest religious and moral demands on the participants,”he said.”I think advocates of this have to face up to the fact that if they want to help the programs that work the best, whether on teen pregnancy or drug treatment … they may be helping the programs with the strongest religious character and, thus, raise the most serious constitutional questions that they could possibly raise.” But Sherman argued the risks of church-state intermingling are worth taking when the problems of society are so great.”We are in a crisis situation,”she said.”There is a hypothetical danger that zealous organizations will take taxpayer money and somehow use it improperly and somebody’s civil liberties will be harmed. … It is a lot less of a danger than most families are dealing with right now because they’ve got gang warfare, they’ve got drug abuse. … We have got to compare the hypothetical danger of that compared to what’s happening out there right now.” (OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)

David Devlin-Foltz, director of the Washington-based Aspen Institute’s Faith and Public Policy program, said it is necessary to recognize the importance of all faiths represented by the recipients of services provided by a congregation.”There is a potential tension,”he said.”It is a nontrivial concern that there will be those who come in contact with that provider who do not share that faith but who might feel that under the circumstances, they do need to take the services that are offered.” Participants in the discussion also pointed out examples of instances where projects were created by congregations without assistance from governmental agencies.

Victor Claman, a United Church of Christ layman from the Boston area, cited an example of a Presbyterian congregation in western Pennsylvania that manufactures small tractors and gives them away to poor farmers.

Claman, president of Insights, a Boston-based research and publishing firm, co-authored a 1994 book titled”Acting on Your Faith: Congregations Making a Difference”detailing projects often funded solely by the congregations.

The Rev. Clarence Newsome, dean of the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, said the social service offerings of congregations across the country include a”wide spectrum of possibilities,”including housing, health, education, child and senior-citizen care and entrepreneurial projects. For example, he cited a church in Chicago with a medical clinic and a dental clinic and a Presbyterian church in Baltimore whose efforts to get youths off the streets led to a youth-run greeting card company grossing $1 million a year.

Commenting after the panel, Claman said”success stories”of congregations _ whether they use charitable choice or not _ need to be shared so more houses of worship can meet needs of their communities.”I think it’s likely that more congregations would get into more serious and assertive programs if they had more funding,”he said.

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