FEEDING THE FLOCK

By ADAM COHEN

The war on poverty may be over, its soldiers in disarray and retreat, but the Rev. Floyd Flake, who is a departing member of Congress, seems not to have got the news. Flake's Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Queens, N.Y., with 9,000 members and a towering new $23 million cathedral, operates a government-funded social-services network that would be the envy of many municipal governments. The church's 30,000-sq.-ft. social-services center houses a city-funded walk-in clinic and federal Head Start classrooms at street level. On the center's second floor are a city-sponsored prenatal-counseling program for teen mothers, a state-sponsored housing and community-renewal program and offices for the federal Women, Infants and Children program. Scattered throughout the building, which is owned by the city of New York and managed by the church, are a city mental-health center and a state Stop Driving While Intoxicated program for drivers whose licenses have been suspended or revoked.

What's more remarkable, all this is only a small part of an Allen A.M.E. antipoverty empire that sprawls across a 26-block stretch of southeastern Queens. To stroll the neighborhood is to see how much can be done when Caesar begins to render unto the church. Allen A.M.E. has used federal funds to provide the community's elderly with 300 subsidized apartments in the Allen Senior Citizens Housing Complex, along with meals and recreational activities. It has transformed abandoned city-owned lots and state mortgage subsidies into 50 affordable suburban-style two-family homes. Down the street from the church is a row of storefront offices offering everything from Medicaid-funded health care for the homebound to city-sponsored psychosocial services for the mentally ill. Flake, who this month announced that he is leaving Congress to devote himself full-time to his church job, says Allen A.M.E. has "taken an urban community that by the press's definition was blighted and turned it around. The best role for government is to be a partner in that process."

The future of America's antipoverty efforts may look a lot like Allen A.M.E. As the nation wrestles with how to reform a failed welfare system, and as more than 35 million Americans continue to live below the poverty line, government is increasingly asking churches to succeed where social workers and bureaucrats handing out checks have failed. State and local welfare departments are starting up innovative partnerships with religious institutions. And a little-noticed provision in last year's welfare-reform law called "charitable choice" has opened the door for the nation's 260,000 religious congregations to take a far greater role in welfare programs: they can now solicit government funds directly rather than set up charitable subsidiaries. Supporters say the spirituality and fellowship offered by churches, combined with their community ties, provide the best hope yet of permanently turning around the lives of the poor. But critics say the new programs threaten to tear down the wall between church and state, and may actually harm the churches that participate.

The first wave of the new faith-based approach to poverty came at the state level, where some social-services departments began matching welfare recipients with participating churches. In Mississippi, Governor Kirk Fordice's Faith and Families program has paired 504 welfare families with 338 churches, which help them with everything from studying for the high school equivalency exam to honing job-interview skills. Michigan's welfare officials have hired two umbrella religious groups to work with more than 100 churches on a similar program. Welfare recipients aren't required to attend church, but the idea is that the church will provide a sense of community and a support network that a welfare office typically does not. "The people in the faith-based institutions are truly interested in the participants," says special-programs manager Christine Poulsen, who coordinates welfare recipient-church partnerships for Maryland's Anne Arundel County. "The congregation becomes a minifamily" for those enrolled. The results in Anne Arundel have been impressive: 19 of the 26 welfare recipients who went through the program are now self-supporting.

For churches, there are two advantages to the new laws. They no longer have to set up secular arms, like Allen A.M.E.'s 11 nonprofit corporations or the Roman Catholic Church's Catholic Charities, to operate government-funded programs. Nor must they strip these programs of religiosity--cover religious symbols or remove evangelical tracts from waiting rooms--to participate. To its proponents, charitable choice is simply about treating churches equally. "Just because an organization has a cross hanging in its window doesn't mean we should discriminate against it and prevent it from helping people," says Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma.

Supporters argue that an approach that aims at people's hearts and focuses on spiritual renewal is better at turning troubled lives around, and there's some evidence for that. "No matter how much counseling, no matter how much social work we put into someone, until we give them something spiritual to fill that void, they won't really change," says the Rev. Ralph E. Williamson, a minister on the staff of the Mecklenburg County, N.C., department of social services with 23 years' experience in the field. "I always tell people that I can't bring salvation through the department of social services." In fact, many programs that aim at life transformation--most notably the hugely successful Alcoholics Anonymous--consider belief in a higher authority a critical component of change. Studies have found that Teen Challenge, a Christianity-based residential drug-treatment program with 130 centers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, has a 70% success rate for those who finish the program, far better than secular treatments. Of course, helping the addicted is one thing, solving the problems of the poor is another.

But traditional welfare programs have failed so badly that any new option looks attractive. Texas was the state quickest to take up the possibilities offered by charitable choice. Last December, Governor George W. Bush directed state agencies to include religious institutions in the operation of their programs. In June, Bush signed legislation clearing the way for religious organizations to provide government-funded drug treatment, day care and faith-based prison ministries. Texas is the only state to allow a private Christian group, Watergate figure Charles ("Chuck") Colson's Prison Fellowship, to operate a voluntary prison-prerelease program. Bush also proposed privatizing the state's welfare system and allowing churches in effect to act as local welfare-service agencies.

Arrangements like Allen A.M.E.'s, in which government funds flow through nonreligious church-affiliated corporations, are relatively uncontroversial. But critics and civil libertarians say the new programs, in which churches become agents of the welfare system, are different. Welfare recipients may soon be forced to pray in order to receive benefits, they say, or to watch religious videos while they wait to talk to their caseworker. "I'm worried we will see tax dollars being used to evangelize as well as provide social services," says the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Others say that's a red herring. Catholic Charities receives more than $1 billion a year in government grants, and no one has accused it of proselytizing. Says Michael Brogioli, director of Catholic Charities' State Welfare Reform Project: "Our job is not to preach the Gospel but to live it."

But critics fret that the law may permit churches to discriminate in hiring based on religion. Inevitably, that question and others will generate litigation. "The answers will be fact-bound," says University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. "But there are things these programs may do that courts will say you can't do."

Some of the strongest opposition to the new programs comes from religious leaders, who are worried that the government is trying to lay the problems of the poor on the doorstep of the churches. Others fear they will be forced to water down their spiritual message and purge religious concepts like sin and God until their work begins to resemble any other bureaucratic undertaking. "The disease of compromising the message will not be felt immediately," says Phil Strickland, director of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission, the Southern Baptists' statewide public policy arm. "It will be like a cancer that grows in the body of the church until the health of the church is compromised." At the same time Governor Bush is encouraging Texas churches to participate in government human-services programs, Strickland is at work on a statewide mailing urging them to think twice before taking on social services. "This is going to be a huge temptation for churches," says Strickland. "But we're going to be raising the warning signals."

--With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Hilary Hylton/Austin and Aisha Labi/New York

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY/WASHINGTON, HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN AND AISHA LABI/NEW YORK