First in an occasional series
PHILADELPHIA - The Rev. Donna L. Jones felt a mighty shift of the church-state ground on the day two months ago when President Bush asked all Americans to bow their heads and pray for the nation's security. ''His message was, don't be afraid of faith,'' Rev. Jones said. ''Honor it.''
That's what she has been preaching since her small Methodist church in a poor neighborhood of North Philadelphia became one of the first congregations in the country to start a welfare-to-work program that mixes faith and federal funds.
From the shabby basement of Cookman United Methodist Church, Transitional Journey has helped more than 225 women over three years acquire high school educations, computer training, life skills, and spiritual counseling. Placing 89 percent of them in jobs was the easy part, Jones said. Much harder was proving that a religious ministry could be a government contractor and remain faithful to its mission.
''Our biggest fear was failure,'' said Jones, a small bundle of energy who admits that her biggest blunder was trying to buy Bibles with funds from the first $60,000 federal grant. ''We were being watched. If we did it wrong, we might mess it up for everybody.''
Bush wants more Rev. Joneses. She is the model for his faith-based initiative, the promise Bush made last January to mobilize so-called armies of compassion and make small, religious charities bigger players in federal antipoverty programs.
Despite political opposition to his plan and a war that upset the White House domestic agenda, the initiative remains a priority for Bush.
White House officials have been quietly negotiating with key senators for weeks and say they are very close to bipartisan agreement on a bill that drops the most controversial element of the original Bush plan - expanding religious groups' access to direct federal grants - and centers instead on personal and corporate tax incentives to spur charitable giving. The measure could be rolled into the overall economic stimulus bill Congress is expected to pass before Christmas.
''What we're hearing from the right, left, and center is they want us to move forward with the initiative,'' John Bridgeland, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said in an interview on Friday. ''Sept. 11 has given us more heart to do more good.''
Ironically, a holy-war massacre, its reverberations on American faith communities, and a national spiritual revival have done more than the president's embattled proposal to put religion in the public square.
In an unprecedented blending of church and state, Bush in his Sept. 20 address to Congress urged grieving Americans to worship, pray, reject bigotry against Muslims, and donate to charities. Hours earlier, Bush had met privately at the White House with 20 religious leaders from many faiths, shared his fears, sought their counsel, and asked them to pray for him and with him. At the end, the group, including the president, sang ''God Bless America.''
''All of us were aware we had participated in an extraordinary event,'' said Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who attended the session.
Taking advantage of the national mood, the bipartisan spirit on Capitol Hill, and the spotlight on charities, the White House got to work with Senators Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, on a new bill. It is expected to call for as much as $50 billion in tax relief for donations; create a $100 million ''compassionate capital fund'' to help social ministries navigate the complexities of federal contracting; and support at least two new social programs, one for mentoring the children of prisoners and another to run maternity homes for pregnant teenagers.
What's missing in the new bill is the president's proposal to widely expand ''charitable choice.'' That provision first appeared in the 1996 welfare-overhaul law and requires states to reach out to faith-based groups that haven't been part of the traditional secular, social-service network. Through charitable choice, social ministries get access to federal grants without shedding their religious character or content.
Since 1996, Congress has included the charitable choice provision in legislation that funds federal drug-treatment and mental-health programs. A bill passed by the House in July and endorsed by Bush would apply it to programs to combat juvenile delinquency, child abuse, domestic violence, and homelessness.
Critics of charitable choice say that it is unconstitutional for government to fund pervasively religious programs; that it violates civil-rights laws because faith-based groups can receive federal funds and practice religious discrimination in hiring; and that it puts clients at risk of unwanted proselytization and required worship, no matter what protections are written into the law.
''Federal funding for religion was bad before Sept. 11, and it is still a bad idea today,'' said the Rev. Barry Lynn, head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Lynn recently joined a coalition of more than 40 civil-rights and religious groups that warned the Senate they would fight the inclusion of charitable choice in a new bill.
In 1997, Jones didn't know much about charitable choice, but she could see a crisis coming in her community when new time limits pushed women off the welfare rolls. She proposed that her congregation undertake an ambitious welfare-to-work ministry and apply for funds under charitable choice, which would allow the program to promote Christian values and have prayers before computer class.
Indeed, Transitional Journey is that rare federal job-training program that begins its day with devotions, ends the day with a prayer circle, and rewards accomplishments with ''hallelujahs!'' Respecting rules against proselytizing, lay minister Wilhelmina Young often starts her scripture-based lesson on goal-setting with a reminder that students may be excused from religious instruction.
They rarely leave. Young remembers urging a Muslim student to sit out of a worship service, but the woman said she liked the gospel hymns. ''This is a ministry,'' said Young, an ebullient Christian in a yellow dashiki. ''Faith is why the women come here.''
Jones says the concerns about charitable choice - hiring discrimination, conversion coercion, state interference in church policy - are unfounded. So is the notion that churches can enrich themselves through it: This year, the government grant of $107,000 will cover only 70 percent of the program's cost, and Cookman United Methodist will have to raise the rest.
There has been a culture clash between a by-the-book federal bureaucracy and clergy who report to a higher authority. Government examiners made Cookman clean up its record-keeping and undergo audits. Jones challenged state rules that cut off a woman's welfare benefits if she missed five days of class.
''There have been many misunderstandings in this new partnership,'' said Jones, who calls charitable choice a ''blessing'' nonetheless. ''The government has guidelines for everything, but we didn't know it.''
President Clinton signed the 1996 welfare law, but his administration never enforced or wrote rules for how the states were to advertise or implement charitable choice.
Amy Sherman, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, said few states have complied with the provision. In a nine-state study, she found that only 84 contracts, valued at $7.5 million, were awarded between 1997 and 2000 to newly eligible religious charities.
More than half of the states have made no grants under charitable choice, even though most, including Massachusetts, long have contracted with faith-based groups like Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army, and Jewish Vocational Services that have removed religious content from their social work.
Bridgeland says that President Bush ''is very committed to the equal treatment'' of religious charities and that ''nothing ought to prohibit them from accessing federal funds.'' To that end, the administration has set up new faith-based offices in five federal agencies to aid social ministries and see that charitable choice, where it exists in the law, is more rigorously enforced.
''Faith-based is the flavor of the month,'' said DeForest Soaries, New Jersey's secretary of state and an ordained Baptist minister who recently spoke in Washington about the trend in states and cities to set up formal partnerships with religious groups to deliver social services.
For example, at least 15 states now have appointed full-time liaisons to clergy and congregations, and governors in four states have issued executive orders to expand state collaborations with social ministries. Legislation has passed in four states, and is pending in a fifth, that instructs local agencies to enforce charitable choice.
Indiana has given $500,000 to Faithworks, a consulting firm that guides small, faith-based and community groups through the government-contracting process. David Rolfes, the project manager, said last year that 45 organizations, 95 percent of them new bidders, received contracts valued at more than $3.5 million with the aid of Faithworks.
Through its state Community and Faith-Based Initiative, Virginia has set up a network of liaisons in 121 local departments and 26 community action agencies and has conducted 10 regional skill-building conferences for religious and civic leaders.
Oklahoma's governor is using $180,000 in surplus welfare funds for a ''proactive'' faith-based office and has hired a pastor to direct it. The office of Interfaith and Community Partnerships in New Jersey's Department of Labor is locating jobs through churches for people moving from welfare to work.
Cities are jumping on the faith-based bandwagon, too. According to the US Conference of Mayors, which created its first task force on faith-based and community initiatives earlier this year, 121 cities now have outreach coordinators to congregations.
Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts' religion program in Philadelphia, where a citywide initiative to recruit church volunteers for mentoring and tutoring is underway, said public officals increasingly are depending on congregations to provide the safety net for women who are reaching the five-year welfare deadline.
''The clock is ticking, and they have no earthly idea what to do,'' Lugo said. ''They are trying to solve a problem through the faith community.''
Jones said traditional job-training programs can't solve all the problems of at-risk women moving from welfare to work.
''People of faith are compassionate to the emotionally fragile,'' Jones said.
''We're geared to people falling through the cracks.''