Churches worry that Congress
will shift social burden to them
April 27, 1996
Web posted at: 11:25 p.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Michael Okwu
NEW YORK (CNN) -- You can always count on the church to deliver prayers, processions, song, and maybe some incense. The religious service is the most prominent part of most churches, the part that ministers to the spiritual needs of its parishioners.(1.0M QuickTime movie)
Beyond the Sunday service is another layer of ministry, one not always seen by the public, but often taken for granted. Churches throughout the country provide physical sustenance to the needy, from computer training sessions for children in California, engineered by Baptists, to career guidance programs for the formerly homeless in New York, backed by an Episcopal church.
Mark Greenberg of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing helps run the New York program. "We have classes in work, life skills, job readiness programs, resume writing, interview skills, job seeking skills, and workplace ethics," he said.
Religious leaders say politics compelled them to pick up the slack -- it was a "divine reaction," they say, to Ronald Reagan's social program cuts in the 1980s.
"You could do a graph to show that when he was elected and the government funding diminished the efforts of the congregation and the churches increased," said Joan Brown Campbell, of the National Council of the Churches of Christ.
The church's efforts increased because in addition to budget cuts, the past decade has produced more homelessness, AIDS, and increased disparity of incomes. There are no national statistics on the their activities, but individual congregations say they've been working overtime.
Consider New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Cathedral's Rev. James Parks Morton said the church offers a crisis emergency center, a shelter, a clothes closet, and counseling. "All of those are immediate. Think of the reverse -- if we just said sorry, we don't have that here."
Church leaders aren't offering apologies to the needy yet. But they are concerned that Congress might succeed in its most recent efforts to slash funding and pass the burden for social services onto churches. "Among church leadership, 'panic' is too strong a word," said Joan Brown Campbell, "but certainly a very strong reaction that says we are almost stretched to our limit."
Catholic Charities USA, the nation's largest network of independent social service agencies, says that the number of people seeking emergency food and shelter between 1981 and 1993 rose by 700 percent. Its budget for last year alone was $2 billion.
Moreover, religious leaders argue, if federal funding is cut for social services, it directly affects their ability to help, because a significant portion of their budgets come from local, state, and federal funding. Sixty percent of Catholic Charities' budget is derived from such sources.
In Harlem, an association of churches, synagogues, and mosques is using private and federal money to provide low-income residents opportunities to live in decent homes. They are currently working on a project called "Affordable Housing for New Yorkers," renovating long-vacated buildings, converting them into 1,500 units of housing for people who normally couldn't afford them.
Federal funding or no, in the modern world, ministers say this is their prophetic work.
The Rev. Morton said religious leaders are "out there ringing a bell, saying look, there's a real problem here. If they don't do that prophetic role as well as the traditional role, I think they're only doing half their job."
Related sites
FeedbackSend us your comments.Selected responses are posted daily. |
|
![[Imagemap]](/US/images/9601/navbar.gif){kind=small}
Copyright © 1996 Cable News Network, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
