Mapping New Turf Between Church, State

Its motto signals that this is no typical government-funded employment agency: “We are praying for your success.” Literally.

Shield of Faith, a Pentecostal congregation in Pomona, received $250,000 in federal funds two years ago to run a job-placement service, the kind of church-state partnership that President Bush envisions dramatically expanding.

The agency’s staff members, who work across the hall from the church sanctuary, offer the usual resume-writing services, job leads and job fairs. But, under 1996 federal rules that lowered the walls between church and state, they also offer prayers and spiritual counseling. These activities, they say, are what give their down-and-out clients faith, hope and healing.

“Let’s pray that God anoints your resume,” job development coordinator Karen Burr said she tells her clients. “The Bible says trust your Lord. . . . Let’s acknowledge God in this process.”

When they aren’t working with clients, the two full-time and three part-time staff members employed under the Department of Labor grant sometimes do church business. On Tuesday, two staff members baptized a woman who walked in off the street, clapping, praising God and speaking in tongues.

The Shield of Faith program highlights some of the major questions facing Bush’s scheme, announced this week, to make it easier for religious groups to obtain federal social service grants: How much religion is permissible in government-funded programs? What role does faith play in the services? And how should enterprises be monitored for the mixing of church and state business?

White House aides have said details of Bush’s plan--which is effectively an expansion of the 1996 rules that apply only to the government’s welfare-to-work program--are to be drafted in the coming months. Court challenges appear inevitable.

“We are really in a new place here,” said Stephen Lazarus of the Annapolis-based Center for Public Justice, a nonpartisan Christian research organization monitoring the issue. “In the past, the rule was no religion. Now, we’re searching around for new ways that balance things more carefully.”

Some church-affiliated nonprofits, such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, have been receiving government funds for decades to run secular social programs. The 1996 law said such organizations could maintain their religious character while operating publicly funded programs. They could not proselytize or worship on program time, for instance, but they could talk about their religious motivations for offering the service. And government agencies awarding the contracts to faith organizations had to ensure that secular alternatives were available in the same area.

In practice, however, the rules are being left for the faith organizations to sort out themselves. Neither the state of California, nor most counties--including Los Angeles and Orange--have issued any specific guidelines mapping out the church-state divide in the new terrain.

A county official overseeing the contract with Shield of Faith said guidelines to more clearly define appropriate roles would probably be issued in the next few months. Bill Yaney, the welfare-to-work program manager with the county’s Community and Senior Services Department, said there have been no complaints about the church operation but he was not sure that offering prayers fell on the right side of the church-state line. He said he would review the agency’s contract.

Shield of Faith, a 1,000-member church, is across from a trailer park, a men’s shelter and an auto repair shop on a seedy Pomona thoroughfare. Operations manager David Burr, who takes a part-time salary from the federal grant, said the staff is careful not to impose religion on anyone. The employment office is devoid of any overtly religious color, with charts of the county’s convoluted welfare-to-work process, rather than pictures of Jesus, tacked on the walls.

Still, there’s no mistaking the religious devotion that permeates the air. Staff members pepper their conversations with scriptural verses and murmurs of “Praise the Lord.” They offer to lay hands on you and fill you with the Holy Ghost. They freely share their own testimony of how they were saved and reborn, including intimate details of past experiences with drugs, sex and despair.

Staff members do not engage in such overtly religious behavior with all welfare clients. But everyone who walks through their doors is offered prayer, and staffers say few of the more than 100 people they have served have turned the offers down. Those who have were still given placement services.

And those who object to the whole idea of religious involvement in public services have other alternatives: Just a few miles away, for instance, the Urban League runs a crisply efficient one-stop career center offering more services, more computers and more programs than Shield of Faith--without the religion. The county also offers its own placement services.

“We are not forcing anything on anyone,” said David Burr, who is married to Karen, the job development coordinator. “We are reducing crime, reducing welfare rolls, reducing poverty. . . . We feel the government should pay us, because we’re doing a good job.”

Programs Offer Spiritual Guidance

Keith Brooks would agree. The tall, slim single father was laid off a year ago from a job at a glass tempering plant in Moreno Valley. Every day, he makes the rounds of three or four job placement centers, trying to find a job--ideally, work in information system management at $15 an hour or more.

For him, the county’s program--offering such services as a job notice board, computers for resume writing and a self-esteem workshop--has been a “complete failure,” Brooks said. The Urban League is the most professionally advanced, he said, with technical resources, solid programs on everything from interviewing skills to computer training and a caring staff that treats him like family.

But only Shield of Faith has managed to land him any jobs--two temporary ones working at the county fair and at a warehouse. Most important, he said, only the church-run program has given him the spiritual healing he needed to recover from his humiliating fall into joblessness and welfare--a fall that he said cost him his home, his longtime lover and custody of one of their two children.

He said his road to recovery began at the church’s employment agency, where Karen Burr surprised him by offering prayer at the end of their meeting. After that, he joined the church. In one of the small “care groups” that meets twice a month, Brooks poured out his bottled-up pain to other men.

Since then, he said, the church’s loving support and constant spiritual encouragement have helped transform him into a strong and confident man who is sure God will soon provide him with a good job.

“When I first came there, I was in a very bad way,” Brooks said. “I was disoriented. I felt humiliated. They built my self-esteem.”

Not every case is a success. Another man, who asked not to be identified said, “I didn’t feel nothing” when he joined in prayers and he still hasn’t found a job. Overall, Karen Burr said, she has found 22 jobs for the 69 people on her caseload. Many of those she has so far failed to place won’t let God work in their lives to overcome their laziness, addictions or other afflictions, she said. Some have limited English skills or learning disabilities.

The program’s biggest challenge, however, is finding enough clients. Burr, a part-time agency worker, said she could handle many more. Simien MaGee, one of the full-time staff members who handles eligibility requirements for the program, has had no new clients this week. In their absence, he said, he “updates files,” helps scout employers who are hiring and occasionally assists in ministry--helping in the baptism this week, for instance.

The staff members said the slow flow of business lies in the county’s refusal to make direct referrals of the 14,000 or so welfare-to-work clients in the Pomona area. That forces the church to solicit at job fairs, rehabilitation homes and check-cashing outlets. James Adams, a regional director with the county program, said the county does not refer because it can’t show favoritism and because it provides the same job placement services.

To people like Brooks, however, the services are fundamentally different.

“The way government programs are set up, they can’t actually nurture people,” Brooks said. “They try to come up with their own services, but that’s not the answer. The answer is God.”