c. 1999 Religion News Service

BOSTON _ The Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical church leader, editor of Sojourners magazine, and a convener of the ecumenical Call to Renewal advocacy organization, often uses the metaphor of a hurricane to talk about the impact of the nation’s welfare reform effort.

Now, with new deadlines being implemented and more people slashed from the welfare rolls, Wallis sees the storm clouds gathering _ and he’s concerned that the church be ready to respond.

That involvement will be the topic of a national meeting next week in Washington, when the National Summit on the Churches and Welfare Reform begins three days of talks on the issue.”The welfare bill has galvanized the churches,”said Wallis, whose Call to Renewal organization is sponsoring the Feb. 1-3 meeting.

The summit’s purpose, Wallis said, is to address issues of poverty, child care, health care, and homelessness _ issues that have, over the past two years, increasingly fallen to the churches to solve.

The summit will bring together more than 400 leaders, policy analysts and faith-based community organizers, representing 40 states and virtually every Christian denomination. Wallis and the other planners hope it will provide a valuable network for Christians from often disparate political and theological perspectives.”It’s a chance for them to meet each other and find the resources that they need,”he said from his temporary home in Cambridge, Mass., where he is a fellow at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of Values in Public Life.”It’s also a time to find a unified voice and speak together on the issues of welfare that affect us,”said the 50-year-old Wallis.

Chief among these issues, he said, is the fact that a new round of welfare cuts are being instituted in states across the country, and with those cuts, health and child care benefits are disappearing.

It is in these cuts Wallis sees the storm clouds beginning for the nation’s poor.”Now we can see the clouds,”he said,”The clouds are the big cuts to moms and kids that are coming in.” New numbers released Monday (Jan. 25) showed welfare rolls at a 30-year low, with 8 million people still on welfare at the end of January. But for many of those moved off welfare, the safety net _ particularly for food and medical care _ no longer exists, driving them to clinics, food pantries, emergency shelters and other private aid sources.

The Clinton administration is indicating it will seek $1.3 billion over five years to repair that safety net.

In Massachusetts alone, 2,300 families were sent notices in early January they would soon be taken off the welfare rolls. This has led to an increased caseload for many religiously based service providers in the area.”There are more people showing up,”said Michael Fetcho, community affairs director for the Massachusetts division of the Salvation Army.

Fetcho says that Boston winters normally bring more people into the Salvation Army’s 31 area Worship and Service Centers, but that the welfare cuts have increased that even further.”The situation gets exacerbated when you’re also dealing with the normal challenges in Boston we’re facing this time of year,”he said.

But despite these strains, Wallis maintains hope for a new kind of cooperative activism among religious organizers _ particularly across political lines.”On principles, I think we’re more and more together on what the Bible requires of us,”he said of the division between politically liberal and conservative Christians.

Wallis said he believes that”probably the biggest area where we can come together is children. You’re hard pressed to say it’s OK that 10 million kids don’t have health care, and that 40 million people don’t have health insurance,”he said.

Wallis is highly critical of the Clinton administration’s policy toward welfare, which he calls”self-serving”and”disingenuous.”He added that for President Clinton to tout”the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years”in his State of the Union address ignores the real problem.”How do people leave the rolls? They get kicked off,”said Wallis, who said that half of those who leave the welfare rolls succeed in getting jobs, and that three-quarters of those with jobs do not have health benefits.”Do we call this success and move on?”he asked rhetorically.

Wallis, who will lead a delegation of his upcoming summit to a briefing on Capitol Hill, said he views his criticism of the government as part of his religious vocation.”The Bible calls kings and governments to task for how it treats poor people, and we should too,”he said,”We are more than social providers, we must be prophetic interrogators of our society.” Wallis said he believes the recent upsurge in”faith-based organizers,”or FBOs, is an important part of holding the government accountable. “I want to get to a day when politicians in both parties have to pacify the churches on the poor. They have to demonstrate that they hear and they care and they’re doing something,”he said.

Other religious leaders agree that FBOs are having an effect on how welfare issues are viewed.”There’s an opportunity for a new active role of the faith-based folk of meeting the needs of the poor,”said the Rev. Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action.

Sider, who has also been a leader in the Call to Renewal movement and is a summit participant, said he believes this is a moment for reflection on the role of the churches in the welfare debate.”A major question is, do we have enough people of faith, especially Christians, who care?,”he said.

Call to Renewal is a three-year-old project of Sojourners,”the independent, ecumenical Christian community, based in Washington, D.C., Wallis founded in 1971. Call to Renewal works on poverty and social justice issues, often bringing together Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and mainline Protestant denominations to confront the welfare problem. “It’s a priority out of necessity,”said the Rev. Stacotto Powell, deputy general secretary and director of national ministries for the National Council of Churches, which represents mainline Protestant denominations.”All of us are being confronted with the challenge of welfare reform because it’s something that confronts our pews,”he said.

Powell said an often overlooked fact is that churches can provide jobs and job training as readily as they provide spiritual guidance.”What people don’t realize is that there are some churches, like African-American churches, who may well be the largest employers in the African-American community,”he said.

Wallis said he is also pleased that churches provide so many jobs, but worries about overconfidence created by the current economic boom.”When the economy is the way it is now, there are a lot more entry-level jobs,”he said.”(But) we’re not going to keep this growth rate forever; there’s going to be a downturn, and the downturn will hit hardest the poorest working people.” This fact makes it all the more necessary to focus on the nation’s poor, Wallis said.”That’s the thing Jesus did that we don’t do,”he said.

DEA END LEBOWITZ